Up and down the Kennebec Valley: How towns cared for the poor

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Many poor houses were designed to punish the poor for their poverty.

by Mary Grow

China concluded and Albion

This article is the third of four that will talk about how central Kennebec Valley towns took care of their destitute residents, when welfare was a local responsibility.

Last week’s piece summarized actions in China from the 1820s into the 1870s, when the poor farm on the east shore of China Lake housed many of the town’s paupers (some were still bid out or assisted as they lived with family members). In the 1870s, the China bicentennial history says, there were often 20 or more people living on the farm, “many of them too old or too ill to help with the work.”

The farm superintendent was usually paid $300 (in 1874, $325) annually. Building maintenance was, or should have been, an ongoing expense. The history quotes from the March 1873 report of selectmen Alexander Chadwick, John Hamilton and Caleb Jones: they called the farm’s house “wholly unfit,” as it was “very cold and void of nearly every convenience which the wants of the inmates and those who have charge of them demand.”

The farm itself was “very much run out,” so that crops were small and income inadequate, they wrote.

They concluded: “The poor are a class of unfortunate beings who are entitled to our warmest sympathies, and demand from us all respect and kindness, and we believe it is a duty which we owe to them and to God, to provide them with comfortable homes and render them as happy as we possibly can.”

Unmoved, voters at the March 1873 town meeting rejected an appropriation to work on the buildings. In 1876, the history says, town records show $161.87 spent on repairs; but in 1877 voters refused to allocate more money to finish the work.

Through the rest of the century the farm hung on, with fewer residents – only half a dozen for much of the 1890s. The superintendent’s pay went down to $200 a year in 1880 and 1890.

The history lists minor upgrades, like a new cookstove in 1887, and building repairs in 1895 and 1900. In 1908, “a well was sunk at the south end of the barn, finally providing an abundant water supply.”

Town reports indicated that the farm also provided overnight lodging and meals for tramps passing through China.

The China history documents an incident that appears to indicate that not all poor China residents wanted to live on the town farm. Voters at the town meeting in March 1881 agreed to reimburse selectmen Elihu Hanson and Francis Jones for their expenses “defending themselves against an assault and battery charge brought by a town pauper, Mary Coro, ‘while in the discharge of their official duties as Overseers of the Poor in removing her to the poor house.'”

For much of the early 20th century China officials rented out the poor farm, at least part of the time with the understanding that if a pauper needed to live there, the tenant would take care of him or her.

A February 1911 report listed “$482.75 worth of livestock, supplies and equipment on the farm.” But, selectmen said, two of the three residents in 1909 had died and the third had left Maine, and no one had moved in during 1910. They suggested town meeting voters consider a change.

At the March 1920 town meeting, voters finally approved selling the farm. Carrol Jones bought it for $2,000 in April.

Associated with the town farm was a cemetery, which the bicentennial history says was “(probably) always a town-owned burying ground.” In the cemetery, in 1975, were the headstone of John Chase, who died June 19, 1839, at the age of 38, “an initialed footstone, and many fieldstones.”

In the 1890s, China’s town farm superintendent “acquired a new responsibility,” the bicentennial history says. The March 1891 town meeting authorized selectmen to buy a town hearse and to build a hearse house, giving them $700 for the project.

Selectmen decided to put the town farm superintendent in charge of the hearse, and they had the hearse house built on the farm. The hearse cost $500, the building $170.39, according to the history.

In 1892, the town earned $15 “for letting the China hearse be used out of town.” What became of the hearse is unstated; the building was part of the farm when Carrol Jones bought it in 1920.

Jones stored his farm machinery in the building for a while before he gave it to “his daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. William Nye, who turned it into a summer cottage.” The cottage was still in use when the history was published in 1975.

* * * * * *

In many areas, poor families were auctioned off to the lowest bidder.

Moving north to Albion, Ruby Crosby Wiggin found that in 1804, voters appropriated $1,200 for roads, $200 for schools and an amount she did not list for “the support of the poor and other town charges.” (If this sentence sounds familiar, it might be because Augusta voters took similar action at a 1797 town meeting, as was reported in the first article in this series.)

Albion voters began bidding out the poor in 1810, Wiggin wrote, during a period of hard times, when newly-built roads were discontinued and produce instead of money was accepted in payment of taxes. In one case, a man agreed to take care of a widow “for $8.00 and the use of her cow for one year.”

Wiggin did not mention paupers again until she excerpted from the 1868 town report. It included, she said, a report that “doctoring the town poor” for a year had cost voters $3.25.

She continued: “Either they were a healthy lot or the Doctor didn’t receive much for each call. We might conclude that there weren’t many poor people, but since the town had maintained a town farm for several years, there must have been a few of them.”

Wiggin gave no more information about the town farm, but Henry Kingsbury devoted a paragraph to it in his 1892 Kennebec County history. He wrote that about 1858, after the poor had been “cared for by individual contract” (presumably since soon after the town was incorporated as Fairfax in 1804), town officials bought a farm “on the Bessey road, three miles south of the Corner.”

The farm had been settled by Solomon Bessey around 1810 and by the 1850s belonged to his nephew, William Bessey. Kingsbury wrote that the initial purchase was 160 acres; later sales and acquisitions made it about 170 acres by 1892.

Bessey Road, now called Bessey Ridge Road, runs south from Routes 202 and 137 to Libby Hill Road, in the southern part of town. An 1879 map of Albion, in the atlas of Kennebec County, shows the town farm on the east side of the road about half-way along. On the same side of the road, C. H. Chalmers lived north of the town farm and H. B. Bessey south; A. Bessey’s property was on the west side about half-way between the town farm and H. B. Bessey.

Albion went through at least two town hearses, according to Wiggin’s history. The earlier was “simply a wooden box on wheels” that was allowed to rot “out back of the hearse house” (wherever that was). Blacksmith Benjamin Abbott bought the “wheels, axletree and tongue” in February 1886 for $16.

By then, Albion had a new hearse, thanks to an 1884 spending spree: in that one year, town officials bought a $200 road machine and a $450 hearse. The hearse, made by Cooper Brothers in Searsmont, was “a beautiful thing,” Wiggin wrote, with shiny black paint, nickel trim and tasseled window curtains.

Its custodian, Bert Skillins, drove “a pair of dapple gray horses that were as spic and span and tasseled as the hearse itself.”

According to Wiggin, as residents admired the new hearse, one commented that “he hoped no one would kill himself just for the sake of riding in it.” Yes, Wiggin wrote: “The first occupant was a suicide victim.”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Halfpenny, H. E., Atlas of Kennebec County Maine 1879 (1879).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Caring for the poor – Part 2

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Augusta city farm, circa 1932.

by Mary Grow

How towns cared for their poor

This article will continue the theme started June 14, how central Kennebec Valley towns took care of their poor residents, jumping across the Kennebec River from Augusta and Sidney to Vassalboro, Windsor, Palermo and China. The focus will remain – mostly – on the 19th century.

The excerpts about caring for the poor that Alma Pierce Robbins chose to quote from official records in her Vassalboro history are tantalizing. Although the first selectmen were elected May 22, 1771, it was not until 1793, the year after Sidney became a separate town from Vassalboro, that the selectmen were also titled overseers, presumably overseers of the poor.

The first mention of a “work house” Robbins found in town records was a discussion at a meeting sometime between 1807 and 1810. In 1811, she wrote, a blacksmith named John Roberts bid $140 to care for Vassalboro’s poor families – she did not say how many families or people.

In 1812, Robbins found, voters agreed to “hire a house for the Poor,” and the next year they paid Roberts $200 for a specified two acres plus “the premises now occupied as a Poor House.”

By 1829, Vassalboro’s paupers were again being bid off. That year, Robbins wrote, Alexander Gardner was the successful bidder, asking for $669.

In 1831, voters went back to providing a poor house. The Roberts farm having been sold, the town paid $1,371.50 to the heirs of Elihu Getchell, Jr., for a property that was designated the new “Town Farm.”

This building was called the Town House by 1845, when voters directed selectmen to buy “a stove and funnell [sic] to warm the Town House.”

In 1852, it was the town farm: town officials spent $2,282.27 for “a new ‘set of buildings.'” In 1867, records said Thomas S. Lang donated $150 of the $230.89 spent for repairs to the town house; and Robbins found another $100 appropriated in 1888.

An 1886 action that Robbins reported suggests where this poor house or farm was located. That year, she found, officials planned to lay out a road from Foster’s mill to the farm “on the west side of the Pond.”

Foster’s mill, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec Country history, was on Seven Mile Stream, the farthest upstream of several mills using the stream’s water power. Since Seven Mile Stream runs from Webber Pond to the Kennebec River, it seems probable that the town farm was on the west side of Webber Pond.

The farm was still operating in 1931, when Harold Taylor, of East Vassalboro (many residents will remember his daughter, Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor, and a few might remember him), repaired its windmill. It was sold in 1945, for $9,805.88, Robbins found.

* * * * * *

Linwood Lowden included a section on care of the destitute in his Windsor history. Examples he selected from the first half of the 19th century indicate that Windsor (the town that was named Malta from 1809 to 1820, Gerry for two years, and Windsor after 1822) alternated between providing a poor house or farm and bidding off paupers, with other measures taken intermittently.

The first report he cited was from a March 1813 town report at which voters were asked if they wanted to build a work house or choose another method. On April 5, they voted to turn the house described as “Joseph Linscotts Meiggs house at his mills” into a “work house for the poor,” with Linscott the overseer. Lowden believed the house was at Maxcy’s Mills on the west branch of the Sheepscot River, in the southeastern part of town.

On Aug. 3, 1815, town meeting voters moved the poor house to a house Joseph Norris owned near his “dwelling house” on the east side of the Sheepscot. Lowden located this house on the Cooper’s Mills Road, a little south of Maxcy’s Mills.

On April 1, 1822, voters moved the poor again, to “John Cottle’s old house,” with Cottle the overseer. Lowden located this house only by original and 1993 owners (Jabez Meiggs and Bernard Dow).

Another house that Lowden called “Linscotts Chadwick house” often housed paupers. In 1816, for example, voters said David Linn’s wife and children could live on the porch and their cow could graze on the Chadwick land, with the selectmen to determine how much to pay Linscott.

(Lowden did not explain, and your writer declines to guess, why the two houses had double names.)

Other town meeting decisions in 1816 and following years:

  • A widow named Betsey Trask and another woman named Molly Proctor were to be given half a bushel of corn every Monday.
  • Three of Molly Proctor’s sons were bid off, two to their uncle Jonas Proctor and the third to Robert Hutchinson.
  • In 1818, the Kennebec County Probate Court granted Calvin McCurda guardianship over five younger brothers and sisters. Lowden explained that their father died in the War of 1812 and “there were pension funds to provide a financial base for the family.”

On April 4, 1837, Lowden wrote, Windsor voters decided to buy a poor farm. They appointed a three-man committee, who bought Thomas J. Pierce’s 90-acre farm.

(Editor’s note:) The possible location of the town farm in Vassalboro, on the west side of Webber Pond. The large island is referred to as Town Farm Island, in an area that was farm land before the dam was installed to form the lake as it is today. The rock lined road to the farm still exists under water.

The farm, Lowden said, was on both side of Route 2 north of the Windsor four corners, partly on the south side of Choate Road, which intersects Route 32 from the east. The farm buildings were on the west side of Route 32.

Lowden surmised that the vote was hotly debated and close. At another meeting a month later, he wrote, voters approved selling the farm and contents; in November 1837, George Briggs of Augusta bought it for $135.

In following years, Lowden wrote, voters went back to bidding off the poor, apparently as a group. In 1848, he wrote, Richard Moody offered to assume the responsibility for $425. Part of the job was to send pauper children to school and provide their school books.

* * * * * *

In Palermo, according to Millard Howard’s history, there was a poor farm for many years, operated as “a private enterprise” rather than owned by the town. Other paupers were bid out; or a relative was compensated for providing room and board.

In 1846, Howard wrote, James A. Huntoon, who was supporting Malvina Huntoon at town expense, “received payment for large quantities of port wine and brandy (medicinal, I assume).”

Howard described the indenture system that Palermo, and other towns, provided for minors who fell into poverty. He gave an 1848 example: after Elvira Brown became a town charge, the Palermo overseers of the poor bound out her son Arthur as an apprentice to a farmer named Charles Hathorn. Brown was to work for Hathorn from March 8, 1848, to Oct. 13, 1865, when he turned 21.

(Your writer notes that these dates say that Brown was not yet four years old when he was apprenticed.)

In return for Brown’s labor, Hathorn agreed to train him as a farmer; to teach him to “read, write and cypher”; and to provide “sufficient clothing food and necessaries both in sickness and health.”

Another issue that Howard discussed at more length than other historians was disputes among towns as to which one was responsible for a pauper who moved around. The rule was that wherever the pauper established “settlement,” that town was responsible. Such disputes seemed especially numerous in the 1840s, he commented.

For instance, in 1843, Howard said, Palermo went to court against Clinton, claiming a family named Chamberlain was not Palermo’s responsibility. Alas for Palermo, the court found that in 1823, Palermo had assisted the Chamberlains, thus assuming responsibility. The case cost Palermo $149.24 in damages paid to Clinton and another $50.26 in legal expenses.

On the other hand, Howard found an instance of cooperation between two towns’ officials: in March 1857, Freedom overseers warned Palermo officials not to be generous if a “smart, healthy young woman in her teens” who “seems very willing, if not desirous, to be a town pauper” showed up on Palermo’s side of the town line.

* * * * * *

China, like neighboring towns, vacillated among methods of providing for paupers, according to the bicentennial history. From the 1820s, they were usually bid off, sometimes individually and sometimes with one bidder assuming responsibility for all the town’s poor.

After decades of discussion and brief ownership of a farm in 1838, a March 31, 1845, town meeting appointed a five-man committee to find a suitable farm and report back in a week. Committee members examined, they reported, between 20 and 30 farms and recommended paying $2,000 for the farm owned by Seth Brown, which the town had owned in 1838.

There were cheaper farms available, the committeemen added, but it would cost more to adapt them.

The history says the farm was on the east shore of China Lake a little north of Clark Brook “and was considered one of the best-situated farms in town.” Between September 1846 and Mach 1849, voters appropriated about $2,800 to pay for the farm (with interest); to provide livestock and equipment; and to pay a superintendent. In March 1850 another $200 was appropriated “to enlarge the farmhouse.”

The history describes the farm as having “a large house and several barns and sheds.” In the 1850s, there were usually 15 or 16 paupers, “most of them old and infirm.” The superintendent and his wife, the able-bodied poor and when necessary hired hands tried to keep the farm at least partly self-sustaining.

A March 1859 inventory listed “two oxen, six cows, sixteen sheep, three swine,” plus supplies of “hay, corn, oats, wheat, vegetables, beef, and pork.” Hens were added in 1867.

Other paupers were living off the farm by the 1860s; in 1868, taxpayers spent more on the farm – over $540 –than on off-farm support – about $400. The farm had sold animals and crops, but had failed to cover expenses; and, the selectmen commented, all of the buildings leaked.

Due to space limits, the story of China’s poor farm will be continued next week.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M. , China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Howard, Millard , An Intro­duction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: The story of Independence Day

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by Mary Grow

Local historians make some references to Independence Day celebrations

According to Wikipedia, celebrating Independence Day on July 4 each year is most likely an error.

The writer of the on-line site’s article on this national holiday says that the Second Continental Congress, meeting in a closed session, approved Virginia representative Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring the United States independent of Great Britain on July 2, 1776.

Knowing the decision was coming, a five-man committee headed by Thomas Jefferson spent much of June drafting the formal declaration that would justify the dramatic action. After debating and amending the draft, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 – having approved the act of independence two days earlier.

Wikipedia further says that although some Congressmen later said they signed the declaration on July 4, “[m]ost historians” think the signing was really not until Aug. 2, 1776.

The article includes a quotation from a July 3, 1776, letter from John Adams, of Massachusetts, to his wife, Abigail. Adams wrote that “[t]he second day of July 1776…will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Adams recommended the day “be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

And so it has been – two days late.

Wikipedia says July 4 celebrations began in 1777, in Philadelphia, where the observance included an “official dinner” for members of the Continental Congress, and in Bristol, Rhode Island. The Massachusetts General Court was the first state legislature to make July 4 a state holiday, in 1781, while Maine was part of Massachusetts.

Windsor historian Linwood Lowden mentioned the importance of the local Liberty Pole as part of Independence Day observances. Liberty Poles, he explained were put up after the Declaration of Independence as symbols of freedom. Many later became town flagpoles; Windsor’s, at South Windsor Corner (the current junction of routes 32 and 17), was still called a Liberty Pole in 1873.

The central Kennebec Valley towns covered in this history series have quite probably celebrated the holiday annually, or almost annually, since each was organized. As with other topics, local historians’ interest, and the amount of available information, vary from town to town.

James North’s history of Augusta is again a valuable resource. He described Independence Day celebrations repeatedly, beginning with 1804 (it was in 1797 that Augusta separated from Hallowell and, after less than four months as Harrington, became Augusta).

In 1804, North describes two celebrations, divided by politics. The Democrats, or Democratic-Republicans (the party of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others) gathered at the courthouse, where Rev. Thurston Whiting addressed them.

(Whiting is listed in on-line sources as a Congregationalist. He preached in Newcastle, Warren and before 1776 in Winthrop, where he “was invited to settle but declined,” according to a church history excerpted on line. He preached in Hallowell in 1775 [then described as “a young man”], and in 1791 is listed in Hallowell records as solemnizing the marriage of two members of prominent Augusta families, James Howard, Esquire, and Susanna Cony.)

The Federalists (the party of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others) began celebrating at dawn with “a discharge of cannon,” North wrote. They organized a parade at the courthouse that went across the Kennebec and back to the meeting house where an aspiring young lawyer, Henry Weld Fuller, gave a speech. The day ended with a banquet at the Kennebec House (a local hotel that often hosted such events), during which participants “drank seventeen regular toasts highly seasoned with federalism.”

(Hon. Henry Weld Fuller [1784-Jan. 29, 1841], born in Connecticut, graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, studied law and came to Augusta in 1803. He married Ester or Esther Gould [1785-1866], on Dec. 21, 1805, or Jan. 7, 1806 [sources differ]. They had seven children, including Henry Weld Fuller II [1810-1889], who in turn fathered Henry Weld Fuller III [1839-1863], who died without issue. North wrote that the senior Fuller served in the Massachusetts legislature in 1812 and 1816 and in the Maine legislature in 1837. He was appointed Kennebec County attorney in 1826 and was a Judge of Probate from 1828 until he died. His grandson, Henry III’s brother Melville Weston Fuller, was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.)

By the summer of 1807, the Democratic Republicans had elected one of their number, James Sullivan, as governor of Massachusetts, and the Maine party members “were in high spirits,” North wrote. On July 4, they heard an oration by Rev. Joshua Cushman, of Winslow, and partook of a dinner for 150 people in lavishly decorated courthouse.

Cushman’s speech was published; North wrote that “it attacked federalism with more vigor of denunciation than truthfulness or discretion.”

(Wikipedia says Rev. Joshua Cushman [April 11, 1761 – Jan. 27, 1834] was a Revolutionary War veteran who graduated from Harvard in 1787 and became a minister, serving Winslow’s Congregational Church for almost two decades. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Massachusetts from 1819 to 1821, and with Maine statehood continued as a Maine member until 1825. He had just been elected to the Maine House of Representatives when he died. Wikipedia says “He was interred in a tomb on the State grounds in Augusta.”)

By July 4, 1810, the Augusta Light Infantry had been organized and paraded as part of the Federalist celebration, which North believed was held in Hallowell. He listed a parade including the Light Infantry as part of the 1810 and 1812 celebrations as well.

Because 1826 was the 50th anniversary of independence, Augusta officials organized an all-day celebration, North wrote. It began with a “discharge of cannon and ringing of bells” at dawn and continued with a parade, a ceremony, another parade, a dinner and fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One of Augusta’s most prominent residents, Hon. Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan 21, 1842), presided at the banquet. Attendees included General John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841), then in his second term as a United States Senator; Peleg Sprague (April 27, 1793 – Oct. 13, 1880), then a member of the United States House of Representatives and later a U.S. Senator; and “some officers of the army and navy who were engaged in the survey of the Kennebec.”

Also present, North wrote, was Hon. Nathan Weston (March 17, 1740 – Nov. 17, 1832), whom Cony introduced as the “venerable gentleman” who served in the Revolutionary army and fought at Saratoga with him. North wrote that Weston “briefly review[ed]…the events which preceded and led to the war of the revolution, noticing the severity of the struggle and the spirit which brought triumphant success, gave the following toast: ‘The spirit of ’76 ­ – alive and unspent after fifty years.'”

(North’s history includes two biographical sections on this Nathan Weston, whom he usually called Capt., and his son, also Nathan Weston, who was a judge and whom North usually called Hon. North did not write anything about Capt. Weston’s military service after the French and Indian wars. However, the younger Nathan Weston was born in 1782 and could not have fought in the Revolution.)

By July 4, 1829, Augusta had been designated Maine’s new state capital (succeeding Portland), and Independence Day was chosen as the day to lay the cornerstone of the State House, leading to “unusual ceremonies and festivity,” North wrote.

The celebration began, as usual, with bells and a 24-gun salute at dawn; continued with a parade featuring the Augusta Light Infantry, many speeches and a banquet; and was climaxed by fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One more Independence Day celebration North thought worth describing was the 1832 observance. That year, he wrote, for the first time since 1811, the two political parties – by then the National Republicans and the Democrats – “each had separate processions, addresses and dinners.”

The Democrats got “part of” the Augusta Light Infantry and a band from Waterville for their parade and held their dinner in the State House. The Republicans’ parade incorporated “the Hallowell Artillery and Sidney Rifles, each with a band of music, and the Hallowell and Augusta band.” Their dinner was in the Augusta House.

The local Republican newspaper, identified by North as the Journal, claimed 2,000 people in the Republican parade. The Democratic Age estimated only 700 in the Democrats’ parade, but claimed 1,000 at the State House meal, versus only 400 or 500 at the Republican dinner.

North wrote that the Journal admitted the Democrats fed a larger crowd, but, North quoted, said snidely, “probably half of them dined at free cost.”

Windsor historian Lowden was another who described an occasional Fourth of July celebration, quoting from diaries kept in the 1870s and 1880s by residents Roger Reeves and Orren Choate.

In 1874, Reeves described “Bells, cannon guns, pistols, rockets, bomb shells, fire crackers” on Water Street, but “very little rum” and “no rows.” (Windsor no longer has a Water Street, and your writer failed to find an old map with street names.)

Two years later, Reeves’ family went to the Togus veterans’ home “to see the greased pig caught,” while Reeves himself intended “to celebrate in the hay field.” And in 1878 Reeves again worked all day, earning “a dollar and a pair of slippers” for whitewashing a barn. In the evening he went “up on the hill and played croquet by lamp light.”

Choate went to Weeks Mills for the 1885 Independence Day celebration (he was 17 that year, Lowden said), and wrote that it included races and a dance and he didn’t get home until midnight.

The next year, 1886, July 4 was a Sunday, so the celebration was on Monday. Choate got up at 2 a.m. to join relatives and friends for a trip to Augusta’s celebration, from which they got home at 3 the following morning. “We had a good time,” he wrote, without providing details.

Other local historians made occasional comments about Independence Day celebrations – for example, the Fairfield bicentennial history says that Fairfield’s Civil War monument was dedicated on July 4, 1868.

Your writer hopes that readers remember enjoyable, perhaps moving, ceremonies from years past and will have a safe and fun holiday this year.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Society of Friends in Vassalboro

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The Abel Jones House, on Jones Road, in South China Village, dates from 1815.

by Mary Grow

An address at the Vassalboro Historical Society

On Sunday afternoon, June 18, Joann Clark Austin, of South China, a semi-retired lawyer and self-described “fifth-generation China Quaker,” spoke on the local history of Quakerism at the Vassalboro Historical Society.

An Englishman named George Fox (July 1624 – Jan. 13, 1691) founded what became known as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, Austin said. Growing up in a multi-denominational society, Fox constantly questioned religious leaders, seeking a faith that was honest, non-commercial and peaceful.

He realized that the Bible, only recently available in English (the King James Bible was published in 1611), presented an image of Jesus as the exemplar of love, forgiveness, equality, cooperation and other traits he searched for. He felt Jesus talking directly to him, and “developed a personal relationship with a living, loving Jesus.”

Fox’s insight became the basis of the Society of Friends. He felt called to spread the news; Austin said his travels included visits to Rhode Island and Boston, where he confronted the Puritans.

Quakers were often persecuted, but persecution only made them more aggressive about preaching their doctrines, Austin said.

Their religious observances took the form of sitting together quietly, waiting to hear the inner voice. Sometimes, an on-line source says, “some participants would feel the presence of the Lord so strongly that they would begin to shake, or ‘quake'” – hence the name Quaker. It was intended as an insult, but Friends proudly claimed it.

Austin said that “Quakerism had a huge impact in Vassalboro and China,” more than in other parts of Maine. She explained that in 1771, British landowners, notably the Vassall family, had a surveyor named John Jones lay out lots in the wilderness that became Vassalboro.

Despite the difficulties of traveling to and in what was then a wilderness, and the further difficulties of clearing space to build a house, grow food crops and graze livestock, the lots sold, and there were Friends among the buyers.

Vassalboro and China Friends connected with Friends elsewhere. Doing title research for the Bristol Historical Society, Austin was amazed to find that a cemetery in Bristol with unmarked graves (typical of early Friends graveyards) had been deeded to Vassalboro Friends meeting.

By the 1750s and 1760s, Austin said, Friends were numerous enough in the American colonies to control governments in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (founded as a haven for the group) and North Carolina.

The Revolution was not a good time for them, however, because one of their beliefs is that war is not a solution to problems. Many were pacifists and therefore were accused of Tory sympathies; and many left colonies like Massachusetts for the Maine frontier.

One Friend who came to Maine in 1777 was a New Yorker named David Sands, Austin said. Reaching Vassalboro, he and his companion were invited to the spacious home of a magistrate named Remington Hobby (some sources spell the name Hobbie).

Hobby welcomed them in his warm kitchen, where, in Quaker fashion, they sat in silence. Thinking his informality had offended his guests, Hobby had a fire built in the best parlor – where again they sat silently.

As Hobby began to wonder if these men were trying to make a fool of him, Sands broke his silence. “Art thou willing to be a fool?” he asked. “Art thou willing to be a fool for Christ?”

Sands converted Hobby, and on future visits helped Hobby increase the number of Friends in Vassalboro.

Austin diverted from history to explain how someone like Sands would decide to travel. The person – not necessarily a man – would feel a call from that internal voice, she said, and would tell the other members of his or her local meeting about it.

Members would decide whether the call was genuine and should be approved. They could, and often did, appoint a second member to accompany the traveler.

Local meetings were held weekly in a member’s house, until the group became too large and built a meeting house. There were also quarterly (four times a year) meetings that brought together regional groups, and yearly meetings with an even wider geographic spread.

Meeting houses were simple and unornamented. If a Friends group outgrew a meeting house and built a larger one, the first one would likely become some family’s home.

A feature of Friends meeting houses was a panel that dropped from the ceiling to divide the room in two, women on one side and men on the other. Each group would discuss the day’s issues and come to its own conclusion, with the women not being overborne by the men.

The process of reaching a decision at such a business meeting Austin called getting “the sense of the meeting.” It is not consensus, and not compromise, but hearing and attempting to answer each person’s concerns. If after discussion one member still disagrees, there is no decision.

Holly Weidner, a Vassalboro Friend, explained from the audience that since everyone in the meeting has within him or her the same divine spark, the clerk of the meeting, who is leading the discussion, has to find the place where everyone is satisfied.

Austin mentioned another Vassalboro Friend, John Damon Lang (May 14, 1799 – 1879), a mill-owner who was appointed and sent West by President Ulysses Grant in 1870 as one of nine Indian commissioners. The commissioners’ mission, according to their report, was to “civilize, educate and provide moral training to the original inhabitants.”

A handout Austin had prepared included photos of three China friends known internationally, Eli Jones (1807-1890), his wife Sybil (1808-1873) and their nephew Rufus (Jan. 25, 1863 -June 16, 1948). In her talk she mentioned Eli’s sister, Rufus’ Aunt Peace (1815 – 1907).

“Her name was Peace?” an audience member asked.

Yes, and the Jones genealogy in the China bicentennial history records women named Comfort, Grace, Mercy and Thankful.

Quakers in central Kennebec Valley

Friends, or Quakers, are important enough in the history of the central Kennebec Valley and surrounding region to merit a separate chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 county history, a chapter written for the book by Rufus Jones, of China.

China’s first settlers, in the summer of 1774, were a family named Clark: Jonathan, Sr., and Miriam and their four sons. Jones wrote that Miriam and two of the sons, Andrew and Ephraim, were Friends; Jonathan and the other two sons were not.

In addition to books written by and about noted China Quakers and other documents, tangible reminders of their presence include five buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places and seven Friends cemeteries.

Friends Meeting House, in Vassalboro.

Three of the buildings have long been private homes, and two still are. In the order in which they were built, they are:

  • The Abel Jones House, on Jones Road in South China Village, dates from 1815 and is one of several Federal-style houses still standing in town. Rufus Jones was born and spent his early childhood there. The South China Library Association now owns the building, barn and land.
  • The Eli and Sybil Jones House on the northwest side of the intersection of Dirigo Road and Route 3 (Augusta Road), dates from 1833 and was the home of the famous missionaries.
  • Pendle Hill, off the west side of Route 202 (Lakeview Drive) was built in 1916 and was Rufus Jones’ summer home until his death in 1948.

The older of the public buildings is the Pond Meeting House on the east side of Lakeview Drive. It dates from 1807 and was used for worship for years; it is now part of the Friends Camp,

The South China Community Church, built in 1884, began as a Friends meeting house, succeeding the Pond Meeting House. It is still a house of worship, now non-denominational.

According to the China bicentennial history, there are seven Friends cemeteries in China. The oldest is behind the Pond Meeting house; here is the grave of Jerusha Fish, daughter of Jonathan and Miriam Clark. Jerusha married George Fish, a British Friend who was lost at sea.

The next oldest China Friends cemetery is on the east side of Neck Road, near the site of a former meeting house. The earliest date in that cemetery is on the grave of Isaac and Nancy Jones’ son Isaiah, who died Aug. 27, 1836, aged eight months. Also buried here is Denmark Hobby, identified in the China history as “a former slave of the Vassalboro Quaker Remington Hobby.”

Two more Friends cemeteries are close together on the east side of Dirigo Road not far south of Route 3, again, the history says, near a former meeting house.

The other three are scattered around town. Jones Cemetery is just south of South China Village, on former Route 3 that runs south parallel to contemporary Route 3. Hussey Cemetery is on the east side of Pleasant View Ridge Road, north of the Bog Brook Road intersection. Lakeview Cemetery is on an eminence on the west side of Lakeview Drive, north of Friends Camp and the Pond Meeting House.

In Vassalboro, according to Alma Pierce Robbins’ history, a Friends meeting house for the “River Meeting” was built in 1786 overlooking the Kennebec River, where the Oak Grove chapel now stands. There is a Friends’ cemetery behind the chapel.

The second Vassalboro meeting house was built in 1798, for the group initially called the “12 Mile Pond” and then the “East Pond” meeting. (China Lake was originally known as Twelve-Mile Pond because it is 12 miles from Fort Western in what is now Augusta.) This meeting house on South Stanley Hill Road is still in active use; there is an adjacent cemetery.

Earlier articles in this series have focused on some of the people and places mentioned today, including stories about Rufus Jones (July 30 and Aug. 6, 2020, issues) and about historic buildings (July 1, July 8, July 15 and July 22, 2021).

Main sources

Austin, Joann Clark, Presentation at Vassalboro Historical Society, June 18, 2023.
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).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Taking care of paupers

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Bidding out was done at town meetings, where officials and voters discussed each needy person or family publicly by name. Residents bid for a poor person, asking a specific sum from the town for a year’s room, board and care, in the pauper’s home or the bidder’s home.

by Mary Grow

The earliest settlers in the Kennebec Valley, as elsewhere in New England, were for the most part able-bodied and self-supporting. But within a generation or two, a settlement would be likely to have residents who were unable to support themselves.

Some might be physically or mentally disabled. Older people might lose their ability to do manual labor and outlive their resources. Children might be left without a caring family.

A bad economy might send people into poverty. Different historians mention the near-destruction of export-dependent businesses (lumbering, for example) and the dramatic increase in prices of food and other necessities caused by the embargo during the War of 1812. Bad weather was another factor; farmers lost crops and income in 1816, the Year without a Summer.

Whatever the cause, if someone was a pauper and had no supportive relatives, caring for the poor was a town responsibility, as evidenced by the expression “going on the town” – becoming dependent on local taxpayers for the means of existence.

An on-line source says going on the town was a last resort and a humiliation. The writer gave three reasons: paupers lost the right to vote or to hold office; town officials might have authority to sell paupers’ property to fund their care; and townspeople looked down on those whom their taxes supported.

Maine towns had at least two ways of caring for their poor. One system was called “outdoor relief:” paupers were either supported financially on their own properties, or bid out to live with more prosperous neighbors.

Bidding out was done at town meetings, where officials and voters discussed each needy person or family publicly by name. Residents bid for a poor person, asking a specific sum from the town for a year’s room, board and care, in the pauper’s home or the bidder’s home.

An alternative was for voters to leave placement decisions to town officials. Officials for this purpose were the selectmen, whose titles included, and in many Maine towns still include, overseers of the poor.

The other option for a town was to buy a piece of property for a town poor house or poor farm, where paupers would be housed and cared for. “Farm” was almost always literal; the residents helped raise crops and tend livestock.

In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond listed another method a person or family who owned property but was facing insolvency could use: the property could be deeded over to the town, on condition that the town would care for the donor(s) for life. Hammond mentioned real estate records showing Sidney had thus become owners of several farms that town officials later sold.

Town officials were careful not to spend their residents’ tax money on other towns’ paupers. Local histories occasionally mention lawsuits between towns to settle which is responsible for a person or family.

The following paragraphs will offer more specific information on how municipalities in the Central Kennebec Valley area took care of their poor before the present era of homeless shelters and homeless encampments.

This topic is one for which your writer’s self-imposed restriction to secondary sources available in books or on line (you’ll remember that this history series started early in the pandemic, when visiting town offices was discouraged) is limiting. Not all towns’ records are available on line, and some town historians wrote nothing about paupers. Others, however, provided enough information to intrigue your writer and, she hopes, her readers.

* * * * * *

At Augusta’s first town meeting, on April 3, 1797 (after Augusta separated from Hallowell in February 1797 and briefly became Harrington), Kingsbury reported that voters approved spending $1,250 for roads, $400 for roads and $300 for everything else, including supporting the poor.

The first poor house was approved at a March 11, 1805, meeting, according to Kingsbury and to James North’s Augusta history. Selectmen were not to spend more than $300. Voters at the annual meeting in 1806 elected George Reed or Read as its first superintendent.

Kingsbury described the location by 19th-century landmarks: north of Ballard’s corner (probably the current intersection of Bond and Water streets), and just south of the Curtis residence in 1805, and in 1892 marked by a “well on the east side of the road and an old sweet apple tree.”

By 1810, according to North, municipal spending had increased in the three categories Kingsbury listed in 1897: the appropriation for roads was $1,500, “payable in labor”; for schools, $1,000, and for everything else (both historians lump the poor “and other necessary charges”), another $1,500.

In 1833, North wrote, Augusta voters authorized selectmen to decide how to care for paupers. Neither he nor Kingsbury explained why there was evidently dissatisfaction with the poor house.

A special meeting in January 1834 made the authorization more specific: after the current contract with David Wilbur (the poor house superintendent?)) expired, town officials were to consider whether to buy a farm, contract or think up “some other mode.”

The five-man committee created to carry out this instruction reported at an April 21 meeting that while the legislature was in session they had talked with people from other parts of Maine and found unanimous support for “thePoor House system, both as regards economy and comfort and the prevention of pauperism.”

This committee recommended a second committee be appointed to look for “a suitable piece of land.” Charles Williams, from the first committee, and four new members of the second committee agreed with the first in advising that the farm be “near the village”; they recommended a third committee to buy a suitable property.

This third committee, which consisted of John Potter from the second committee and four more newcomers, reported to a Sept. 9 town meeting an agreement to buy Church Williams’ farm for $3,000. Their action was approved and yet another committee, chaired by Potter, appointed to build a house on the property.

The building went up by the end of 1834, North wrote. By 1870, he said, it had been “enlarged from time to time to the dimensions of the present commodious and convenient almshouse.”

A century after the building was finished, an on-line report on the Depression-era New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s work relief project describes repairs planned in 1934 and done in 1935. The writer said they were much needed: “Very few people realized the condition of this building and the unsanitary conditions and the inmates were living in.”

By then the building consisted of four floors over a large basement, “all of which were deteriorating rapidly.” Early steps were to reinforce a ceiling and put a partial new foundation “to keep the kitchen and range from falling into the basement.”

“The entire building was so infested with cockroaches and bedbugs that a special machine had to be hired along with an operator to exterminate these insects. All beds and bedding including blankets, mattresses, pillows and sheets were destroyed and replaced.”

Interior walls were replastered or repapered or painted; plumbing and heating systems were totally updated; the building was completely rewired; all the stairways were replaced, as were 20 doors and about 75 windows. A laundry was added and equipped, and a shed converted to a well-stocked store from which “the town truck delivers food daily to the city’s poor.”

The work crew consisted of 21 men. Total cost in labor, supplied by the ERA, was almost $5,400; the City of Augusta provided about $5,000 worth of materials. Work began Jan. 24 and was finished June 6, 1935.

The undated on-line site adds that the building had since been demolished and the Augusta public works department had moved onto the property.

* * * * * *

In Sidney, immediately north of Augusta on the west side of the Kennebec River, historian Hammond wrote, in the context of official town business in the 1790s, that “A problem right from the beginning was how to provide for the poor in town.”

She found an (undated) record of an early incident: the town constable “was ordered to serve notice on at least 25 families [presumably poor families] who had moved into town without first seeking permission.”

Town clerk’s records show that the constable carried out his orders, but, Hammond said, there is no proof the families were equally obedient; instead, some were still in Sidney years afterwards.

In addition to bidding out paupers, Hammond found Sidney town meeting voters repeatedly appointed a committee to buy a poor house or poor farm – and at the next meeting rejected the committee’s recommendation.

In 1867, she wrote, “the town actually purchased a working farm, hired a superintendent and moved paupers to the house.”

This poor farm was on 100 acres where Town Farm Road runs west off River Road (now West River Road) to Middle Road, in the north end of Sidney. The 1879 Kennebec County atlas shows the farm in the northwest corner of the three-way intersection; some of the land, then or later, was on the east side of West River Road (see below).

In 1869, Hammond wrote, voters directed selectmen to lay out and fence a cemetery on the town farm.

The 1877 town meeting warrant included an article Hammond quoted: “To see if town will vote to build suitable places at the poor house on the farm so as to be able to control the unruly poor.”

She also quoted the voters’ decision: “That it be left with the overseers to put them on bread and water if they see fit.” (Note the plural “overseers,” – by 1877, taxpayers were paying more than a single superintendent to staff the farm.)

This farm was a working farm, as Hammond’s information from what she called a typical inventory in the February 1895 annual report showed. The farm then had 28 hens; a dozen sheep; four cows and two yearlings; and two pigs. There were stockpiles of hay, straw, potatoes, turnips, oats, beans and beets.

The inventory further listed ham, pork, flour and butter; vinegar, pickles, molasses, spice and salt; and 80 gallons of cider and one pound each of tea and coffee.

Town officials and voters continued to debate whether the farm was the best arrangement, Hammond wrote. They agreed to lease it to different people, and eventually closed and sold it in 1919 to Mrs. Clara Wilshire for $3,000.

Hammond wrote that the sale did not include “the gravel bank on the east side of the River Road.” J. J. Pelotte later bought that parcel for $1,000. (Sidney’s 2003 comprehensive plan, found on line at the University of Maine Digital Commons site, lists the J. J. Pelotte gravel pit.)

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor’s Colburn family

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by Mary Grow

Exceptionally attentive readers with exceptionally good memories might remember that Francisco Colburn was one of the commanders of Windsor’s Marcellus Vining GAR Post in the 1880s (see the May 25 issue of The Town Line).

Marcellus is not a typical Maine name, to be sure – presumably his classically-educated parents named him after the Roman Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42 – 23 B.C.). But for some reason, your writer was struck by Francisco, and began wondering why a couple in Windsor, Maine, in the 1830s would choose that name for their son.

The question remains unanswered. The search for the answer revealed a lot of information – and misinformation – about a once-prominent Windsor family.

A Civil War source found on line says Francisco Colburn was born in 1839. On Oct. 20, 1861, when he was 22 years old, he enlisted as a corporal in Company C, 1st Maine Cavalry. He was promoted to sergeant and then first sergeant in 1863, and was mustered out of service on Nov. 25, 1864.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, added that he came back to Windsor and made his home on a piece of the family farm.

He married Sarah E. Chatman (1838 – 1922), daughter of Andrew Chatman, another Windsor resident. One on-line genealogy says their only child was a son they named Charles H.; born in 1865, he died in 1881, in his mid-teens.

However, Kingsbury listed four sons, all, from the wording, alive in 1892: “Francisco, George A., Horace and Raymond.” And another on-line family history says Francisco and Sarah had five sons: Francisco D., Jr. (1862 -1901); Charles (1865 – 1881); George Arthur (1867-1936); Horace (1869-1957); and Raymond (1873-1940).

Kingsbury wrote that the first Francisco served as Windsor town treasurer for 1882 and 1883. He might have been a town selectman for two years beginning in 1886: Kingsbury listed “Francisco” as a last name, with a blank for the first name, but your writer suspects a printing error.

Francisco died in 1928, in his 89th year. He, Sarah and Charles are buried in Windsor’s Oak Hill Cemetery, their graves marked by one of the five tall monuments there. A plaque lists the three names, with dates; to the south, a flat stone marks Charles’ grave, and two more flat stones to the north are labeled “Mother” and “Father.” There are no other marked graves in the plot.

In early June 2023 a new American flag stood beside the monument.

* * * * * *

Francisco’s parents were Horace Colburn (Sept. 11, 1812 – April 15, 1885) and Almena Wilson Colburn (July 1813 – Feb. 11, 1903). They and other Colburns, including some of Francisco’s brothers and sisters, are buried in Windsor’s Resthaven cemetery.

Linwood Lowden’s history of Windsor includes a reproduction of a photograph of Francisco’s mother. Mrs. Almena Wilson Colburn is standing by a large spinning wheel in the dooryard of a white-painted house with a portico across the front. She wears a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length dress, dark-colored with small white flowers (?). Her dark hair, parted in the middle, is drawn tightly behind her head.

Sources differ wildly on the names and lives of Francisco’s siblings; in the following paragraphs your writer combines several contradictory lists.

One says he had two older sisters for the first 10 years of his life. Ginevra was born in 1836 and died Aug. 13, 1849, when she was 12 years old. Delphena was 13 when she died Sept. 10, 1849. There might have been an epidemic that fall; Caleb W., born in 1845, died Oct. 3, 1849.

By then Horace and Almena had another daughter, Minerva, born Jan. 20, 1848, in Winslow (according to an obituary found on line). Minerva was a bookish child who soon began teaching, a career she continued until she married Dr. James A. Pierce on April 7, 1875.

The Pierces moved to Stockton Springs, where Minerva, though a semi-invalid for many years, was a well-loved community member. They had one son, James A. Pierce, Jr.

When Minerva Colburn Pierce died Dec. 26, 1900, at 88, the obituary says she was survived by her husband and son; her 88-year-old mother; one sister; and three brothers. Your writer has identified her mother and three brothers, Francisco, Joseph and Frank, but cannot name a surviving sister.

According to an on-line genealogy, Joseph (April 1843 – April 12, 1919) was born in Windsor. Kingsbury said he lived on part of the family farm and taught school in the winter from the time he was 16.

The genealogy said he married Eliza A. Wyman (Aug. 1843 – May 18, 1919) on Sept. 15, 1864, in Waterville. They had at least two children, Frederic (Oct. 1865 – ?) and Grace Almenia (Aug. 4, 1871 – Dec. 28, 1908). Joseph and Eliza are buried in Norton, Massachusetts.

Frank was Francisco’s youngest brother, born in 1854 and died in 1927. He too lived on the family farm and was a teacher from his teens.

Frank’s gravestone in Resthaven Cemetery says he married Lizzie E. Donnell (1861-1942). C. Arlene Barton Gilbert’s chapter on education in Lowden’s history lists Frank Colburn and Lizzie Donnell among 1881-82 Windsor teachers – Lizzie’s fifth, sixth and seventh terms and Frank’s eighth. Lizzie Colburn was still a Windsor teacher in 1927; by then the school year was 30 weeks, and teachers earned from $15 to $18 weekly.

Another source lists Sanford Colburn (? – Mar. 6, 1878) as one of Francisco’s five siblings (and omits Minerva). Your writer has found no other information on Sanford Colburn.

* * * * * *

Horace Colburn is mentioned frequently by both Lowden and Kingsbury.

On Oct. 21, 1839 (the year Francisco was born), Lowden said, Horace Colburn, of Pittston, bought a farm on the west side of current Route 32 (“the main road leading to China Village”), about a mile north of the Windsor Corner post office. Carlton Colburn is listed as a co-purchaser, and elsewhere Lowden added Joseph; he did not explain their relationships.

The ad describing the farm (from the May 9, 1835, issue of The China Orb, published in China Village) said it was about 150 acres, 60 acres under tillage and the rest “woodland of an excellent quality.” The property included “a young orchard”; an almost new sawmill (built by a prior owner named Nathan Tollman in or before 1832); three shingled barns, two 36-feet-square and the third 30-feet-square; other outbuildings; and a “good well of water” close to the farmhouse.

The brook that powered the mill, called Colburn Brook in Lowden’s history, was either the one now called Dearborn Brook or the tributary (unnamed on on-line maps) that joins it from the west near Meadow Brook Lane.

The 1856 and 1879 Windsor maps Lowden reproduced both show H. Colburn’s sawmill. Kingsbury wrote that in 1892 Horace Colburn’s sons were running it; Lowden believed it operated until at least 1900.

The nearly-new farmhouse was a story and half on “an excellent cellar.” Five of the six rooms on the ground floor had fireplaces.

The seller was John B. Swanton, Jr., of Bath, and the ad named local representatives Ebenezer Shaw, Esquire, in China Village, and Ebenezer Meigs, Esquire, in South China. Why it took four years to sell the farm Lowden does not guess.

Horace’s sons Francisco, Joseph and Frank all settled on the property, changing the area’s semi-official name from Linn Hill to Colburn Hill. For some years they ran the shingle mill and farmed, and Joseph and Frank taught school.

According to Kingsbury, Horace Colburn was Windsor’s town treasurer in 1848, 1850, and 1856; served as a selectman for six years, beginning in 1853; and was “twice elected county commissioner, which office he held at his death.”

Gilbert listed Horace as a member of Windsor’s 1866-67 Superintending School Committee, with Orren Tyler and C. A. Pierce. The three reported that there were 478 students on April 1, 1866. They evaluated each of the teachers, mostly local, mostly female, whom they supervised during 24 terms in 13 schoolhouses.

They then berated Windsor voters. Teachers would have done better, they wrote, with proper schoolhouses:

“Three-fifths of our school houses are not fit places for schools. They would be more appropriate for pig-pens or hen-houses, we might have said stables, but conscience forbids, for many of the parents are sending their own children to those miserable huts called school houses which they would not even think of keeping their horses or oxen in during the winter season without repairing.”

Their suggested remedy was to consolidate districts so taxpayers could build fewer, better schools, arguing that a good school a mile and a half away was better than “a nuisance” close to home.

In 1876, voters elected Horace Colburn moderator of an Aug. 12 special town meeting called to replace the tax collector, after an investigation that generated a report Lowden could not find in the town records.

Horace’s younger sons also held town offices, according to Kingsbury. He lists Joseph as supervisor of schools from 1871 to 1886, town clerk in 1883 and 1887 and a selectman for two years beginning in 1891; and Frank as town treasurer in 1884, apparently as his brother Francisco’s successor, and supervisor of schools in 1888 and 1889.

Lowden found other odds and ends of Colburn family history. For example, after Windsor Grange (Patrons of Husbandry No. 284) was organized June 2, 1886, the second Grange Master was Frank Colburn, in 1888. In 1895, there were seven Colburns among the membership: Francis (Francisco?) and his wife; Frank and his wife; J. (Joseph?), Eliza and Fred (Joseph’s wife and son?).

Two of Windsor’s early cemeteries

Linwood Lowden’s Windsor history has a section on town cemeteries, including the Resthaven and Oak Hill cemeteries in which 19th-century Colburns are buried. Henry Kingsbury listed both graveyards in his Kennebec County history.

Resthaven Cemetery, much the larger of the two, is on the east side of Route 32 just south of the Maxcy’s Mill Road intersection. Oak Hill Cemetery is less than half a mile north, on the west side of Route 32 just south of the Reed Road intersection.

said Resthaven Cemetery’s first burial was that of Persis Wheeler, in 1810; Kingsbury dated the graveyard to 1808. Lowden wrote that Persis’ husband, Samuel Wheeler, Sr., “apparently” owned the lot then, though shortly thereafter it was Joseph Linscott who deeded it to what was then the Town of Malta.

Lowden found a call for a July 1, 1811, special town meeting at which voters were asked to buy some “ground for a burying ground,” though he found no related records. He also found a May 6, 1814, record of a decision to fence the cemetery; and he quoted Linscott’s 1816 description: half an acre “in length ten rods on the said mill road [Maxcy’s Mill?] and in width eight rods situated where the graves now are.” (A rod equals 16.5 feet.)

Linscott wrote in the 1816 document that the land was intended as a “burying yard” for the Town of Malta and that he had received “the value thereof from said town.”

Lowden said this cemetery was at different times named the Burying Ground on the Ridge, the Mill Road Cemetery and the Sand Hill Cemetery. He found it was re-fenced in 1856, and in 1859, the by-then-Windsor “selectmen divided this yard into lots.”

The Colburn/Coburn/Oak Hill Cemetery, Lowden wrote, was “established as early as 1822 if not earlier.” The first burials, beginning in 1822, were members of the David Given family. Kingsbury called it “the Chapman burying ground.”

Lowden contradicted Kingsbury’s claim that Oak Hill Cemetery was owned by those who bought lots there. He listed town expenditures: a pre-1837 fence; 1847 fence repairs; in 1853, approval of a half-acre expansion, at a cost of $25.00; in 1857, voters’ rejection of a request to whitewash the fence; and in 1858, selection of a three-man committee to “lot out” the yard.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day – Part 3

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Grand Army of the Republic hat insignia worn by the Horse soldiers.

by Mary Grow

GAR posts Fairfield, Windsor, China, Albion & Sidney

Continuing with central Kennebec Valley GAR Posts in the order of their formation, the next after Billings Post #88, in Clinton, was Fairfield’s E. P. Pratt Post #90 (in Somerset County, therefore not on the Kennebec County list in Henry Kingsbury’s history). According to Barbara Gunvaldsen, of the Fairfield Historical Society, this Post was organized Oct. 18, 1883.

Records at the FHS History House (the 1894 Cotton-Smith House) include a summary biography of Elbridge P. Pratt, in whose honor the Post is named. He was born in 1841, son of a farmer, Jesse Pratt, and his wife Hannah (Hubbard) Pratt.

On July 23, 1862, Pratt enlisted in Fairfield; he was mustered in July 25 (Wikipedia says Aug. 25) in Bath as a private in the 19th Maine Infantry, for three years. On July 27, his unit went to Washington, where it was stationed until September 1862. In October, the 19th was assigned to the Army of the Potomac.

Battles in which the 19th fought included Fredericksburg, Virginia (Dec. 11-15, 1862); Chancellorsville, Virginia (April 30 – May 6, 1863); and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1-3, 1863).

Pratt was killed on July 2, 1863, one of 232 men – more than half the regiment’s total – the 19th lost at Gettysburg. He is buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery.

E. P. Pratt GAR Post was still active in early 1918. A paragraph in the Tuesday, Jan. 10, 1918, issue of the Fairfield Journal announced the Wednesday, Jan. 16 (either day or date must be a misprint) installation of officers of the E. P. Pratt Relief Corps (the GAR ladies’ auxiliary) at the GAR Hall. Post members and wives, Corps members’ husbands and Sons of Veterans and their wives were invited.

* * * * * *

South China’s James Parnell (or Parnel) Jones Post #106 was organized April 23, 1884, with 25 charter members, Kingsbury said. At first members met in the AOUW (Ancient Order of United Workmen) hall; in 1885, according to the China bicentennial history, they built their own hall (demolished in 1964) at the crossroads where South China’s Memorial Park now stands.

Kingsbury said the GAR building was “complete in itself, containing a large hall, offices, rooms for Sons of Veterans and a Woman’s Relief Corps, and suitable banquet hall.”

Major James Parnell Jones (May 21, 1835 – July 12, 1864) is locally famous as “the Fighting Quaker.” Born in China, son of Quaker missionaries Eli and Sybil Jones, he was educated at the State University of Michigan and Haverford College, Pennsylvania.

On Sept. 15, 1857, he married Rebecca Maria Runnels (1836 – April 14, 1899).

When the Civil War began in April 1861, Jones was principal of China Academy, in China Village. He and Rebecca had lost their first son, James Lecky, in 1859, at the age of six months; their second, James A. “Jamie,” had been born Feb. 16, 1861. Nonetheless, Jones promptly helped raise and became captain of the unit that became Company B, 7th Maine Infantry.

In September 1862 he was slightly wounded. In 1863, he was promoted to major. In 1864 he was wounded again, at the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7); and on July 12, 1864, he was killed at Crystal Springs, Virginia, outside Washington D. C.

Sometime in 1863 Jones had home leave, because his and Rebecca’s daughter, Alice, was born Aug. 6, 1864. She lived five days, dying on Aug. 11; and on Aug. 14, three-year-old Jamie died.

Parents and children are buried in China’s Dudley Cemetery, on Dirigo Road, with James P. Jones’ mother, Sybil. His father Eli’s grave is in the nearby Dirigo Friends Cemetery.

Rebecca remarried on Sept. 29, 1867, to Rev. Moses W. Newbert.

An undated obituary from the Lincoln County News says Newbert was born in Waldoboro and died May 6, 1898; the accompanying picture of his tombstone shows he was aged “64 yrs. 3 mos. 14 dys.” The obituary writer praised his “natural ability” as a preacher and said, “His success in the ministry was remarkable.”

The obituary says he began preaching about 1856 “under the direction of the Methodist Conference.” Starting in Palermo, he moved to North Vassalboro, China and Southport; to Wisconsin for two years; and back east to serve in several Maine towns, including Waldoboro.

A period of ill health led to a change to an unspecified 15-year “business career…in China and Camden.” He then returned to the ministry, with posts in “Cushing, Caribou, Hodgdon and Linneus, Sprague’s Mills.” Ill health led to retirement to a farm in China for his last two years, the obituary says.

Newbert’s first wife was Helen Augusta Washburn (Oct. 6, 1829 – May 11, 1866), daughter of Zebah and Susan Washburn of China; they were married March 6, 1860. Newbert is buried in Zebah Washburn’s family plot in the China Village Cemetery.

The newspaper obituary says his second wife was “Mrs. Maria R. Jones, of China, whose first husband was Maj. Jones, who was killed during the war of the Rebellion.” A Methodist yearbook found in line adds that in his last years Newbert was “tenderly cared for by his faithful and devoted wife.”

* * * * * *

Grand Army of the Republic badge.

In her research into the history of Albion, Ruby Crosby Wiggin found that Albion’s first Memorial Day observance was in 1885. She wrote that Civil War veterans from Albion and adjoining China organized Grand Army Amos J. Billings Post #112 on May 17, 1884, in China Village.

Kingsbury gave June 17 as the date and said there were 20 original members.

The two towns jointly financed the 1885 Memorial Day celebration, with Albion’s March 1885 town meeting raising $25 for the holiday observance and for decorating solders’ grave.

Kingsbury listed commanders of this Post as Llewellyn Libbey, John Motley, B. P. Tilton, J. W. Brown, Henry C. Rice, Robert C. Brann, A. B. Fletcher and John Motley.

Amos Judson Billings was born Jan. 20, 1833, to Benjamin Allen Billings (1799-1870) and Sarah (Tenney) Billings (1801-1882). On May 1, 1853, in Waldo, he married a woman named Bacon, perhaps Elizabeth A. Bacon (the on-line census record is unsure).

Billings rose to the rank of lieutenant in Company G, 24th Maine Infantry. Census and town records agree that he died of disease in Arkansas on July 28, 1863. His grave is in Albion’s Libby Hill Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Sidney’s Joseph W. Lincoln Post #113 honors Lieutenant Joseph Warren Lincoln, who was born in 1835 and died at Falmouth Virginia, April 8, 1863. His gravestone in the Lincoln Cemetery on Quaker Road says he served in Company F of the 20th Maine; a GAR note on the Find a Grave website, dated 2016 (after the GAR ceased to exist), says Company I, 20th Maine.

In 1857, according to Find a Grave, Lincoln married Laura Ann Whitman McPeak (Jan. 4, 1837 – Sept. 20, 1869). Born in Douglas, Massachusetts, she died in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Sidney Post first met May 24, 1884, according to Kingsbury. Starting with 11 charter members, it had 26 members in 1892.

Meetings were held in the Grange Hall, Kingsbury wrote; GAR members had “contributed considerable labor” to help build it. In her 1992 history of Sidney, Alice Hammond said meetings of both the Post and the Women’s Relief Corps were “in the Town Hall for many years.”

Kingsbury’s list of Post commanders included, in order, Nathan A. Benson, A. M. Sawtell, Thomas S. Benson, John B. Sawtell, Simon C. Hastings, James H. Bean, Silas N. Waite and Gorham K. Hastings. Hammond said Bean was in charge for many years, and his wife, Vileda Bean, was the longest-serving president of the women’s auxiliary. Kingsbury listed Vileda A. Bean among charter members when the Women’s Relief Corps was organized July 29, 1890.

* * * * * *

Windsor’s Marcellus Vining GAR Post honors Lieutenant Marcellus Vining (May 2, 1842 – May 19, 1864).

Kingsbury wrote that Marcellus Vining was the grandson of Jonathan Vining, who came from Alna to Windsor about 1805, and son of Daniel Vining (April 27, 1810 – Feb. 10, 1890). A farmer, Daniel had 12 or 13 children by two wives; Marcellus was his oldest son by his first wife, Sarah Esterbrook (or Esterbrooks) of Oldtown.

Marcellus Vining became a private in the 7th Maine Infantry on Jan. 25, 1862. Kingsbury wrote that the 19-year-old’s “ability and courage soon pointed him out as one especially fitted to a more important place among his comrades.”

Vining received two promotions before his two-year enlistment ended. When he reenlisted Jan. 4, 1864, it was as a sergeant in Company F of the 7th Maine.

He was promoted twice more that spring, to second lieutenant, Company A, on March 9 and to first lieutenant, Company A, on April 21. Wounded at the May 12, 1864, Battle of Spottsylvania, Virginia, he died May 19 in Fredericksburg, before, Kingsbury said, receiving the federal government’s notice that he had been promoted to captain. He is buried in Windsor Neck Cemetery.

Kingsbury wrote that as Vining awaited death, he wrote his father a letter in which he said that “it was preferable for him to die in the defense of his country’s flag than live to see it disgraced.”

Vining GAR Post #107 was organized June 2, 1884, Kingsbury said. Before then, Lowden wrote, residents celebrated Decoration Day at the National Soldiers Home in Togus.

Kingsbury listed the Post commanders, to 1892, as H. A. N. Dutton, Francisco Colburn, George E. Stickney, G. L. Marson, Cyrus S. Noyes and Luther B. Jennings.

Lowden said Windsor’s Post members met every Saturday night in the GAR Hall, the second floor of the town house. The Hall accumulated memorabilia; Lowden wrote that in 1886, “a Mr. Bangs presented a picture of Marcellus Vining,” and Kingsbury added that the Vining family donated Marcellus Vining’s army sword, a life-size portrait and a flag.

Lowden believed Vining Post continued “well into the twentieth century.” Windsor voters helped fund the organization, usually at $15 a year, he wrote. In 1929, however, “$30.00 was appropriated for G.A.R. Memorial and paid to the Sons of Veterans,” the successor organization to the GAR.

After local Memorial Day observances began, they typically included a speech, Lowden said. Windsor’s first was in 1887, and “must have been appreciated since a $13.00 honorarium was paid to the speaker who to this day has remained anonymous.” Lowden did find names of several ministers who delivered memorial addresses in the next decade.

Gustavus B. (G.B.) Chadwick

One of Windsor’s Memorial Day speakers, according to Linwood Lowden’s history, was G. B. Chadwick, in 1892. Though not listed as a minister, he almost certainly was: Rev. Gustavus B. Chadwick, a member of a prominent South China family. In the China bicentennial history (where he is consistently referred to simply as G. B. Chadwick), he is mentioned as a school committee member, head of the Masonic Lodge, in South China, and in 1872 among the people who bought the Chadwick Cemetery, where he is buried.

Information from the on-line Find a Grave site says Chadwick was born July 24, 1832, in China. On Aug. 27, 1864, he enlisted in the navy and served as a Landsman on the USS Rhode Island until honorably discharged June 3, 1865. He was a member of China’s Amos J. Billings GAR Post.

Gravestones in China’s Chadwick Hill cemetery list Rev. G. B. Chadwick (did he so dislike the name Gustavus?) and dates; his wife Clara M. (1851-1934) (probably born Clara Erskine); their son Wallace W. Chadwick (1892-1930) and Wallace’s wife Martha Francis (Gardner) Chadwick (1891-1947).

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Holidays: Memorial Day

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by Mary Grow

GAR posts Augusta, North Vassalboro and Clinton

Waterville’s W. S Heath GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) Post #14, described last week, was the second founded of the eight in the part of Kennebec County covered in this series, according to Henry Kingsbury’s county history. It was the third of 19 in the whole county, Kingsbury wrote.

Kingsbury’s list begins with a post in Gardiner, followed by Augusta’s Seth Williams Post #13, organized July 25, 1872. Then came Waterville’s, organized Dec. 29, 1874.

Kingsbury then listed:

  • Richard W. Mullen Post #33, North Vassalboro, no date given;
  • Billings Post #88, Clinton, organized Oct. 9, 1883;
  • James P. Jones Post #106, South China, organized April 23, 1884;
  • Vining Post #107, Windsor, organized June 2, 1884;
  • Amos J. Billings Post #112, China Village, chartered June 17, 1884;
  • Joseph W. Lincoln Post #113, Sidney, mustered May 24, 1884.

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Brevet Major General
Seth Williams

Brevet Major General Seth Williams (March 22, 1822 – March 23, 1866), for whom the Augusta GAR Post was named, was an Augusta native, Kingsbury wrote. James North, in his Augusta history, said his parents were Daniel and Mary (Sawtelle) Williams; Mary was from Norridgewock. Daniel and his brother Reuel were prominent in Augusta business and politics.

Seth Williams graduated from West Point July 1, 1842, and served in the United States First Artillery (Kingsbury; North says it was the Second Artillery), either entering as a brevet second lieutenant (North) or attaining the rank in 1844 (Kingsbury).

(The word “brevet” means someone promoted to a higher rank, especially as a reward for outstanding service, without the higher pay that normally accompanied the new rank.)

An on-line article by Charles Francis added that among Williams’ “minor” posts in his first three years in the military was Hancock Barracks, in Houlton, Maine.

Williams was promoted to first lieutenant in 1847, during the Mexican War (April 25, 1846 – Feb. 2, 1848). North wrote that he was in battle at Palo Alto (May 8, 1846) and Resaca de la Palma (May 9, 1846), and during the latter “his gallant bearing attracted the notice of a distinguished general officer, who invited him to become a member of his military family.”

(The officer was General Robert Patterson [Jan. 12, 1792 – Aug. 7, 1881], an Irish-born Pennsylvanian, veteran of the War of 1812. He was wounded at the April 18, 1847, Battle of Sierra Gordo, not seriously enough to keep him from becoming a successful businessman and serving in the Civil War.)

When Williams visited Augusta in July 1847, North said, Colonel James L. Child hosted a party at the Arsenal and townspeople gave Williams an inscribed sword.

Kingsbury wrote that Williams was brevetted captain the day of the Battle of Sierra Gordo in recognition of his “gallant and meritorious conduct.”

After the Mexican War ended, Williams served in other minor posts until he became adjutant at West Point from September 1850 to August 1853. Francis wrote that he “was held in the highest esteem, and was remembered with affection” by the cadets he supervised.

Next he became a captain and assistant adjutant general in Washington, where he remained until the Civil War began in April 1861.

Williams served in both staff and battlefield positions. Kingsbury’s account of his service includes membership on General George McLellan’s staff in the early days; becoming a major in August 1861; and later that year becoming “adjutant general of the Army of the Potomac” and “brigadier general of volunteers.”

Although these were challenging jobs, North and Kingsbury wrote that Williams’ performance was approved by the various commanders he supervised. Francis wrote that Williams was made a brevet colonel for his gallantry in the July 1, 1863, Battle of Gettysburg.

In November 1864 (North) or on Jan. 12, 1865 (Kingsbury), failing health led to his reassignment as Inspector General on General Ulysses Grant’s staff. In this position he inspected parts of the army in Virginia before taking part in the final Civil War campaign and the negotiations for General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865.

Williams remained in the army after the war ended, serving on General George Meade’s staff. Kingsbury said his final “special service” was as a member of a January 1866 commission that investigated charges brought by the government of Prussia about “the enlistment of some of its subjects into our army.”

Sources differ on how Williams became a brevet general. Kingsbury and North imply he was promoted before his death in March 1866; they wrote he became a major general as of August 1864 (North) or effective March 13, 1865 (Kingsbury). Wikipedia says President Andrew Johnson nominated him to the two ranks on April 10 and July 17, 1866, with both appointments retroactive to March 13, 1865.

Kingsbury praised Williams as a man who did his duty even if he thereby hurt others, but was in private “one of the most lovable of men.” Kingsbury’s adjectives for him included courteous, tactful, beloved, admired and respected. North concurred. He called Williams “modest” and “unassuming,” with “sterling qualities of mind and heart that won the respect and confidence of acquaintances and associates.”

When General Grant heard that Williams had died in Boston, Massachusetts, he telegraphed sympathy to Williams’ father and asked that the body be buried at West Point. The family chose Forest Grove Cemetery, in Augusta.

Williams’ body came to Augusta “by special train,” North wrote. There was a service at St. Mark’s Church and another at the graveside, but at the family’s request, the only military ceremony was a 15-gun salute at the Arsenal.

Afterwards, North wrote, Williams’ father commissioned a memorial stained-glass window in St. Mark’s Church.

Francis mentioned one more memorial to Seth Williams: Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth, named on April 13, 1899, honored the Augusta soldier. The fort was active through the two world wars and beyond; it was closed on June 30, 1962, Wikipedia says, and since July 1979 has been Fort Williams Park.

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Richard W. Mullen Post #33, in Vassalboro, honors the man identified in Alma Pierce Robbins’ Vassalboro bicentennial history as one of the first officers in the 14th Maine regiment when it assembled in Augusta in 1861.

From its position on Kingsbury’s list, the Post must date from mid-January, 1881. Kingsbury said it had 18 charter members and by 1892, 42 members.

Kingsbury located Post #33 in North Vassalboro, but he was probably in error. The Vassalboro Historical Society owns a black and silver DAR ribbon with the Post’s name and number that plainly says “East Vassalboro, ME.”

Writing in 1971, Robbins said, “All older citizens will recall that the Richard W. Mullen Chapter, G.A.R., was active in Vassalboro for many years until they turned their records over to the American Legion Post #126 (1942).”

Over those years, she reported, the town donated to the Women’s (or Woman’s) Relief Corps (the GAR’s ladies’ auxiliary) to decorate veterans’ graves and hold Memorial Day services. The Legion and Auxiliary took over those responsibilities.

Capt. Richard Wright Mullen, son of Richard Mullen, was born April 19, 1831, in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and died May 14, 1875, in New Orleans, Louisiana, according to the Find a Grave website.

The Maine Adjutant General’s Report for the year ending Dec. 31, 1861, lists Richard W. Mullen, of Vassalboro, as the captain of company B, 14th regiment. When the report was compiled, the 14th was in camp at Augusta.

(The regimental commander was Colonel Frank S. Nickerson. Col. Nickerson, born in Swanville, Maine, became a brigadier general and survived the war, dying in Boston in 1917.)

Wikipedia says the 14th Maine was mustered into active service Dec. 31, 1861, and mustered out Jan. 3, 1865. Attached to General Benjamin Butler’s New Orleans expedition, the men took ship from Boston Feb. 6, 1862; they were in Mississippi from early March to mid-May, got to Louisiana early in July and fought in the Aug. 5, 1862, Battle of Baton Rouge.

Mullen is buried in the North Vassalboro cemetery. On his gravestone above his name is the Latin phrase “In hoc signo vinces,” commonly translated as “In this sign, thou shalt conquer” and a cross.

A long inscription says he was “severely wounded” at the Battle of Baton Rouge. Despite only partially recovering, he was “called into public service” and when he died was collector of customs in Franklin, Louisiana, a town west of New Orleans.

(State records say 86 members of the 14th Maine were killed or died from their wounds, and 332 died of disease.)

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Billings Post #88, organized in Clinton on Oct. 9, 1883, had 19 charter members and 23 members in 1892, Kingsbury wrote. Meetings were held in Centennial Hall.

Capt. Charles W. Billings

The Post honors Clinton native Captain Charles Wheeler Billings (Dec. 13, 1824 – July 15, 1863), son of Abijah (or Abaijah) Munroe Billings (1797-September 1881) and Rhonda (or Rhoda) (Warner) Billings (1798-1836).

An on-line article by Paul Russinoff, a Marylander who collects Civil War photographs, says that Abijah Billings ran a wool carding mill and was postmaster in Clinton. He sent his son to a private school; when Charles was 22, he bought a half-interest in his father’s mill.

In 1849, Charles Billings married Ellen Libby Hunter (July 1, 1833 – 1924), daughter of a prominent local family whose patriarch was in the lumber business. They had three daughters, Isadore Margaret (Billings) Timberlake (1850 – 1897), Alice Warner Billings (1856-1860) and Elizabeth W. “Lizzie” Billings (1860 – Dec. 7, 1863).

By the outbreak of the Civil War, Billings was an established businessman and active in town affairs, holding office as a selectman and as town clerk. He did not volunteer for military service in the excitement of 1861, but did on Aug. 9, 1862.

Russinoff quotes from a letter to his father suggesting his motivation: he saw the war as a choice between protecting liberty and “let[ting] the sword of despotism and ignorance sweep over our fair country.”

In the fall of 1862, as a second lieutenant in Company A of the 20th Maine, Billings started keeping a diary, which Russinoff said ended in April 1863. Also that month, he returned to Clinton for the last time on a 15-day-furlough.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 7, 1863, Russinoff wrote, he had been transferred to Company C and promoted to captain.

Billings was wounded in the left knee at the Battle of Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. His wife got word, and with his younger brother, John Patten Billings, came to Gettysburg; they arrived on July 15, a few hours after Billings died in the Fifth Corps field hospital at Gettysburg.

The 20th Maine monument at Gettysburg lists him as the highest-ranking officer in the regiment to die as a result of the battle.

Ellen had his body brought back to Clinton. She did not remarry; Russinoff found that she later lived with daughter Isadore, in Lancaster, New Hampshire.

Where she was between Isadore’s death and her own, Russinoff did not say. Ellen is buried with Charles, their daughters and his parents in Clinton’s Riverview Cemetery.

On the Men of Maine Killed in the Victory of Baton Rouge, Louisiana

(A poem by Herman Melville, 1866)

Afar they fell. It was the zone
Of fig and orange, cane and lime
(A land how all unlike their own,
With the cold pine-grove overgrown),
But still their Country’s clime.
And there in youth they died for her –
The Volunteers,
For her went up their dying prayers:
So vast the Nation, yet so strong the tie.
What doubt shall come, then, to deter
The Republic’s earnest faith and courage high.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: May holidays

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Nearly 50 years after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Civil War veterans marched down Main Street, in Waterville, on May 30, 1913, in the annual Memorial Day parade. The decades since the war had thinned the ranks of these members of the GAR, who fought in the war.

by Mary Grow

The month of May hosts two well-observed national holidays in the 21st-century United States: the second Sunday is Mother’s Day, and the last Monday is Memorial Day.

There will be no story about Mother’s Day; it’s too new (but see the box). Nor will your writer trouble you with details about the many other May holidays listed on line.

May 11, for example, is National Eat What You Want Day, National Twilight Zone Day, National Foam Rolling Day and National Technology Day. The seven May 12 observances include National Limerick Day, National Nutty Fudge Day and National Odometer Day.

Later in the month, those so inclined can celebrate National Frog Jumping Day and National Fruit Cocktail Day (May 13); National Sea Monkey Day (May 16); Pack Rat Day and World Baking Day (May 17); International Red Sneakers Day and World Bee Day (May 20); World Turtle Day and National Asparagus Day (May 23); National Paper Airplane Day and World Lindy Hop Day (May 26); National Paperclip Day (May 29); and on May 31, National Flip-Flop Day, World No Tobacco Day and World Otter Day – and those are from only two lists.

Memorial Day, celebrated this year on Monday, May 29, had its origins almost 150 years ago. The day was first called Decoration Day, and it honored soldiers who died in the Civil War.

Local groups in former Confederate states and in Pennsylvania started putting flowers on soldiers’ graves each year soon after the war ended in April 1865, leading to debate about who started what became national recognition of deceased veterans.

Wikipedia says as of last year, the National Cemetery Administration (part of the Department of Veterans Affairs) gave credit to Mary Ann (Mrs. Charles J.) Williams, of Columbus, Georgia. She was president of a group who, in March 1866, began a newspaper campaign to persuade people to decorate both Confederate and Union soldiers’ graves in the South. Their chosen day was April 26.

The national holiday began May 30, 1868, when, Wikipedia says, General John A. Logan called for decorating Union soldiers’ graves. After the 20th-century world wars, the holiday expanded to honor all veterans.

Congress officially named it Memorial Day in 1967, and in June 1968 passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, effective Jan. 1, 1971. This law moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day to Mondays and created Columbus Day as another Monday holiday.

(In 1978, Veterans’ Day was moved back to Nov. 11, the date World War I ended. Labor Day was a Monday celebration before 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was added in 1986.)

General Logan was in 1868 commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an organization of Union veterans founded in 1866 in Springfield, Illinois. The GAR held its first national meeting on Nov. 20 that year in Indianapolis, Indiana. It dissolved in 1956, after its last member died.

Several local town historians included information about Memorial Day. Linwood Lowden, commenting on his research in the history of Windsor, said that Decoration Day, Independence Day and Christmas were “the holidays that seemed to be of the greatest importance.”

Lowden wrote that the GAR’s Department of Maine, established in 1867 or 1868, was “instrumental” in persuading the Maine legislature to make Memorial Day a legal holiday in 1874.

Two on-line sources say that in 1885 Maine had 130 GAR posts with 8,235 members and in 1888 150 posts with 9,345 members. It was in June 1885 that Portland hosted the 19th National Encampment, attended by 20,000 Civil War veterans including, Lowden wrote, Abram Choate, of Windsor.

From the 1860s into the 20th century, most municipal Memorial Day celebrations were led by local GAR posts.

* * * * * *

Gen. Isaac Bangs

Waterville’s W. S. Heath Post #14 was chartered Dec. 29, 1874, with 26 members, according to charter member General Isaac Sparrow Bangs’ chapter in the Waterville centennial history.

The Post’s name honors Lieutenant Colonel William Solyman Heath, Colby 1855. Born March 13, 1834, in Belfast, he married Maria E. Moor (born 1838) in Waterville in 1856, soon after he graduated from Colby.

The couple had three children, Ethel Maud Heath (born Sept. 1, 1857, in Minneapolis, according to an on-line genealogy, and died in 1898 in the state of Washington); Sidney Moor Heath (born Aug. 27, 1859, in Waterville, died April 3, 1919, in Hoquiam, Washington); and William Francis Heath (born Oct. 13, 1861, in Waterville, and died there April 26, 1863).

When the Civil War began, Heath raised and captained a company of Waterville volunteers, who joined the 3rd Maine Volunteers. He became a colonel in that regiment and later a lieutenant-colonel in the 5th Maine.

Heath was killed in the June 27, 1862, Battle of Gaines (or Gaine’s or Gaines’) Mill in Hanover County, Virginia, where, Bangs wrote in 1902, “for forty years he has slept under the grass and flowers in an unknown grave.”

Another charter member of W. S. Heath GAR post was William Heath’s younger brother, Francis “Frank” Edward Heath, Colby 1858. Joining the 3rd Maine with his brother, he later became lieutenant-colonel, then colonel and finally brevet brigadier-general in the 19th Maine, Bangs wrote. Francis Heath survived the war and died in Waterville on Dec. 20, 1897.

The Friday, June 3, 1881, issue of the Waterville Mail (available on-line through Colby’s digital commons, which your writer has previously praised as a valuable resource) had several articles about Memorial Day observances on Sunday, May 29, and Monday, May 30, 1881.

Sunday evening, the newspaper reported, Baptist church pastor Rev. W. H. Spencer addressed Waterville’s W. S. Heath GAR Post, the Waterville Light Infantry and interested residents. Vassalboro’s R. W. Mullen Post members were invited, but because of rain only a few men came.

Post and infantry members “marched to the tap of the drum” to the church, where they sat “giving good attention to a soldier speaking to soldiers.” The paper explained how Rev. Spencer compared military soldiers to soldiers of Christ.

The next day, Memorial Day, about 50 Post members, again escorted by the infantry regiment, took donated wreaths and set out for Pine Grove Cemetery, by way of Monument Park where they put a long wreath on the monument.

Monday was rainy, too, and before the veterans got to the cemetery a “copious shower” made it “advisable to double-quick for shelter in the hearse house.” After waiting out the heaviest rain, they went into the cemetery, heard a prayer by Congregational pastor Rev. E. N. Smith, distributed the wreaths and marched back to their (unspecified) assembly point.

Monday evening, the Baptist Church ladies put on a program that raised $104 for the Post, to be used “to aid needy soldiers and their families.” The Mail gave the program, which included war songs, reminiscences and a group of young women performing the “Waiters Drill,” which the anonymous writer said was “so prettily done, and so gratifying to the large audience that long continued applause compelled its repetition.”

After the program, those present enjoyed cake and ice cream and conversation in the vestry, decorated with flags and pictures and with war memorabilia on display. The writer added a bit of editorializing:

“The ranks of the veteran soldiers are thinning every year, and they will not long remain with those for whose benefit they fought and suffered. Do them good while they are alive and can appreciate your grateful service, and do not content yourselves with building monuments to their memory, or helping to decorate their graves after they are dead.”

The origin of Mother’s Day

Wikipedia dates holidays recognizing mothers and motherhood to the ancient Greeks and Romans and early Christians. In the United States, Wikipedia credits West Virginian Anna Maria Jarvis (May 1, 1864 – Nov. 24, 1948) with starting Mother’s Day observances.

Jarvis’s mother, Anna Maria (Reeves) Jarvis (Sept. 30, 1832 – May 9, 1905), founded groups called Mothers’ Day Work Clubs. Before the Civil War, club members focused on public health issues, helping families improve sanitation, reduce infant mortality and control disease, including, Wikipedia says, creating milk inspection programs “long before there were state requirements.”

Anna Jarvis

During the Civil War, the western part of Virginia where the Jarvises lived was so split between North and South that part of it became the separate, pro-Union state of West Virginia. The older Anna Jarvis insisted that her clubs be neutral; members helped provide food, clothing and medical care to Union and Confederate soldiers alike.

Wikipedia describes the 1868 Mothers Friendship Day she organized in Pruntytown, West Virginia, attended by veterans from both armies and their families, with bands playing Dixie and The Star-Spangled Banner and everyone singing Auld Lang Syne at the end.

The younger Anna Jarvis remembered that her mother often wished there were a national holiday honoring mothers. Another proponent was Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – Oct. 17, 1910, best known as the author of The Battle Hymn of Republic), who in 1870 combined two causes when she called on all mothers to cooperate to promote peaceful resolution of disputes.

On the morning of May 10, 1908, Jarvis organized, and Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, in Grafton, West Virginia, hosted, the first public Mother’s Day celebration in the United States. Jarvis also organized a larger celebration – 15,000 attendees, Wikipedia says – that afternoon in Philadelphia.

Her idea spread, and she lobbied to make the day a nationally-recognized holiday. Congress considered it in 1908, Wikipedia says, and rejected it amid jokes about Mother-in-Laws’ Day. Within three years, however, a day honoring mothers was celebrated nation-wide and was officially a holiday in some states, including West Virginia.

Wikipedia says: “In 1912, Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrase ‘Second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder’ and created the Mother’s Day International Association…. She specifically noted that ‘Mother’s’ should ‘be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.'”

On May 11, 1913, members of the United States House of Representatives wore white carnations in honor of mothers, complying with a May 10 resolution sponsored by Representative James Heflin (D-Alabama; later a United States Senator). In 1914, Heflin followed up with legislation making the second Sunday in May officially Mother’s Day.

Heflin’s bill directed that the United States flag be flown on Mother’s Day “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” The House approved promptly; Senator (former Representative) Morris Sheppard (D-Texas) led Senate supporters.

President Woodrow Wilson received the bill on May 8, 1914, and signed it that day.

Carnations are not in the law, but remain associated with the holiday, along with cards, flowers and candy – a commercialization that Anna Jarvis deplored.

Two buildings related to the founding of Mother’s Day are on the National Register of Historic Places: the Anna Jarvis House in Webster, West Virginia, where Jarvis was born; and the International Mother’s Day Shrine, at 11 East Main Street, Grafton, West Virginia.

The Shrine, according to its website, was incorporated in 1962 in the 1873 Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church as “an international shrine to all mothers and as a memorial to Anna Jarvis, founder of Mother’s Day.”

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Plagues

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Fairfield Sanatorium circa 1940. One of the scourges of the late 19th century through the mid 20th century was Tuberculosis. According to Wikipedia, Tuberculosis (or TB), is an infection caused by bacteria. Typically, it affects the lungs, but can affect other parts of the body. In 90% of cases, the infection remains dormant and goes undetected. In about 10% of cases, the infection goes active. Common symptoms of the active infection include fever, night sweats, and weight loss. Because of the weight loss, the disease was often called “consumption”. Back when it was a major health crisis, those who were infected were often quarantined in sanatoriums. This was common practice across the United States, even here in Maine. The idea was that these sanatoriums would not only separate the sick from the people they could infect, they would also treat the TB. The thought was that they would treat them through good nutrition and fresh air.

by Mary Grow

Note: “The first article in this Kennebec Valley series appeared in the March 26, 2020, issue of The Town Line. Having completed a three-year run, your writer intends to take a few weeks off.”

Since this historical series started in the spring of 2020 as a way to distract writer and readers from the Covid-19 pandemic, part of the plan has always been a survey of past local disease outbreaks.

Someone at the Maine State Museum had the same idea. The museum has a one-page document uploaded in 2020 and headed Maine’s Historic Pandemics.

(The difference between an epidemic and a pandemic is that an epidemic is localized to a country or region; a pandemic affects multiple countries or the whole world. Since this article is focused on the State of Maine, your writer reserves the right to use “epidemic” even when the disease described sickened people outside Maine.)

The museum website lists five diseases, three too recent to qualify for your writer’s attention in this article:

  • Smallpox was at its height from 1600 to 1800; the worst epidemics had a 30 percent death rate; and it was especially severe among Native Americans (who, unlike Europeans, had no previous exposure to give them a chance to develop immunity).
  • Cholera was most frequent in Maine between about 1830 and 1850, with seven separate outbreaks, the museum’s chart says. The death rate is put at 50 to 60 percent.
  • Tuberculosis became epidemic from 1900 to 1950, with a 25 percent death rate. One of Maine’s three tuberculosis sanatoriums was in Fairfield – see the Sept. 22, 2022, issue of The Town Line.
  • Maine’s polio epidemic ran from 1900 to 1960, mainly affecting children. The death rate is listed at 5 to 15 percent; many who survived were paralyzed or lamed for life.
  • Influenza is listed as a pandemic in 1918 and 1919, when the disease spread world-wide. The death rate was 2 percent.

Abandoned Fairfield Sanatorium today

Some Maine local historians frequently mentioned epidemics; others ignored them. Diseases most often noted were smallpox, scarlet fever and diphtheria.

In a 1995 paper for Maine History (reprinted on line in the University of Maine’s invaluable Digital Commons series), John D. Blaisdell called smallpox “one of the most frightening of all diseases.” Often fatal, especially to children, the virus left survivors with permanent scars; the Maine State Museum website says it also caused blindness.

A National Park Service (NPS) website discusses the development of inoculation, the practice of deliberately sharing smallpox by transferring pus from an infected person to a healthy one. Doctors discovered that the person being inoculated would usually have a mild case and would seldom develop the disease again.

The website uses colonial Boston as an example. In a 1721 smallpox outbreak, Puritan minister Cotton Mather heard about inoculation from his African slave, Onesimus, and talked Dr. Zabdiel Boylston into trying it.

The website calls this trial inoculation “incredibly controversial.” People got so angry that someone bombed Mather’s house. Many feared the health consequences, and clergymen insisted that smallpox was “God’s punishment for sin” and therefore inoculation “interfered with God’s will.”

Boylston, undeterred, took the experiment seriously and followed up. He found that the 1721 outbreak killed 14 percent of the people who accidentally caught it from others, versus only two percent of those who were deliberately inoculated.

People slowly accepted inoculation, including George Washington, who promoted it regularly during the Revolutionary War to keep his army healthy enough to fight. In 1777, he ordered soldiers inoculated, “the first medical mandate in American history,” the NPS website says.

Inoculation was succeeded by vaccination, a process using a weakened or altered version of the pathogen against which immunity is desired (an on-line site says today the terms inoculation and vaccination are used synonymously). Blaisdell wrote that the earliest smallpox vaccine was developed in Great Britain by Edward Jenner in 1798; the idea came to Boston in 1799 and was “quickly accepted by the American medical community.”

The earliest local reference to smallpox your writer found was in James North’s history of Augusta. He mentioned an October 1792 outbreak among Hallowell residents; “Mr. Sweet and two of his children died with it,” he wrote.

In 1816, Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins said in her chapter on schools, there was enough fear of a smallpox outbreak that, she quoted (from town records), “a sum was voted to insure the Inhabitants against small pox.”

The earliest disease outbreak Wiggin mentioned in her Albion history was in 1819.

Smallpox was spreading among townspeople, and there was agreement on what to do about it, so voters created a committee to “use every effort to prevent the further spread of small pox.”

Wiggin added that there was no further information on the committee’s success or failure in town records, and neither she nor Robbins gave any hint as to the method(s) used. Wiggin wrote that she found records of another outbreak years later.

Also in 1819, Blaisdell referenced a Penobscot Valley outbreak, starting in Belfast and moving up the river. He said that Hampden doctor Allen Rogers used vaccination as one method of fighting it.

Blaisdell noted another outbreak in early 1840 in Winterport and Bangor.

Linwood Lowden wrote in his history of Windsor that an 1864 town meeting warrant asked for money to compensate Patrick Lynch “for damage received on account of being fenced up [quarantined] for the public safety in the case of small pox.” On May 14, 1864, voters approved paying Lynch’s doctor’s bill.

Lowden found a record of a smallpox vaccination – probably not the first one in town, he wrote – on Thursday, Nov. 12, 1885, when a Dr. Libby, from Pittston, vaccinated Orren Choate.

Another 19th-century method of controlling smallpox, diphtheria and other contagious diseases was fumigating the premises with a gas like chlorine, cyanide or formaldehyde, Lowden wrote.

Cholera, an intestinal disease characterized by severe diarrhea, is caused by a bacterium that is usually transmitted through contaminated water or food. The disease is often fatal unless it is promptly diagnosed and treated.

The major way to prevent cholera is adequate sanitation. It is now uncommon in developed countries, but epidemics still occur in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cholera vaccines are available and are recommended for residents of and travelers to areas where the disease is common.

Your writer found no records of cholera in the Kennebec Valley, but it could well have killed residents here, because it has been documented elsewhere in Maine. An on-line site, citing an April 2020 article in the Bangor Daily News, mentions outbreaks in Bangor in 1832 and in 1849, and one in Lewiston in 1854 that caused 200 deaths.

The article says the cause of the 1832 Bangor outbreak was a trunk of clothing that had belonged to a sailor who died of cholera in Europe. When his belongings were sent home and shared among family members and friends, the disease was shared, too.

The history article in the Dec. 1, 2022, issue of The Town Line mentioned an 1883 case of scarlet fever in East Machias that was attributed to contaminated clothing brought from an infected area.

Closer to home, Martha Ballard’s diary recorded scarlet fever in Hallowell in the summer of 1787. Entries in June, July and August describe patients with “the rash” or “canker rash” (an old name for “a form of scarlet fever characterized by an ulcerated or putrid sore throat,” according to the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary).

Captain Henry Sewall’s son Billy died June 18, a week after Ballard was first called to see him because he was “sick with the rash.” By the end of July Rev. Isaac Foster had it and was unable to preach. (Last week’s history article summarized relations between Sewall and Foster.)

Early in August, Ballard was back and forth among several households with sick children, some she explicitly said had scarlet fever and others so ill they must have had it too. All the McMaster children caught it, and William McMaster died; Ballard sat up all night with him before his death, and wrote of her sympathy for his pregnant mother.

On Aug. 7, Ballard started at Mrs. Howard’s where her son James was “very low”; went to see Mrs. Williams, who was “very unwell”; to Joseph Foster’s to check on the children there; and to her back field to gather some “cold water root” that she took to Polly Kenyday for a gargle, “which gave her great ease.” When she got home, she found her husband with a very sore throat; he too benefited from the cold water root and “went to bed comfortably.”

The 1899 Windsor Board of Health report, cited in Lowden’s town history, recorded eight scarlet fever cases.

Local historians mentioned two diphtheria epidemics in the second half of the 19th century.

During the 1862-63 school year, according to a town report Wiggin cited, 17 students in Albion schools died of diphtheria – she found no record of infant or adult deaths. (That was a sad winter, she pointed out; it was during the Civil War, from which, according to one report she found, only 55 of the 100 Albion men who enlisted returned.)

The 1988 history of Fairfield mentioned a diphtheria epidemic in 1886.

Lowden listed repeated outbreaks of typhoid fever in Windsor. He wrote that it killed four residents in 1850 and “three young men” in 1877; and the 1899 Board of Health report recorded two more cases.

Biographical sketch of Fairfield’s Dr. Frank J. Robinson

The context for the mention of the Fairfield diphtheria epidemic was a biographical sketch of Dr. Frank J. Robinson (Jan. 23, 1850 – February 1942).

A native of St. Albans (about 30 miles north of Fairfield), Robinson taught school before enrolling in Maine Medical School (later Bowdoin College) in January 1874 and graduating from Long Island College of Medicine in 1875 (the writers of the Fairfield bicentennial history do not explain how he did this; they do say he took numerous post-graduate courses).

Robinson practiced in Fairfield for 65 years, in an office in the Wilson block on Main Street until 1936 and thereafter from his 71 High Street home. The Wilson Block was evidently a medical center; the Dec. 16, 1902, issue of the Fairfield Journal, found on the Fairfield Historical Society’s website, reported that “Dr. Austin Thomas, who has come here from Thomaston, is not as has been reported, associated with Dr. I. P. Tash but has leased the offices in the Wilson block, formerly occupied by Dr. Goodspeed.”

Robinson treated people in Benton, Clinton and as far away as Norridgewock, according to the history.

He was still active at a public commemoration of his 89th birthday, the occasion on which the history says he remembered the diphtheria outbreak that infected 44 Fairfield residents.

The Fairfield historians added that he was again honored on his 92nd birthday, the month before his death, recognized as “one of the oldest practicing physicians in Maine, if not in the country.”

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Lowden, Linwood H. good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.