Local student makes a difference

Ashlynn Niemi, of Augusta, joined with more than 360 first-year students at Emmanuel College, in Boston, Massachusetts, to make an immediate impact in the community through the New Student Day of Service.

Rising early on the last day of summer vacation, the students volunteered at food shelves, homeless shelters, and other organizations that meet vital community needs through the day of service.

In addition to encouraging new students to embrace Emmanuel’s rich history of serving the common good, the day of service helped them connect with Boston and each other.

SNHU announces summer 2025 president’s list

Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), in Manchester, New Hampshire, congratulates the following students on being named to the Summer 2025 President’s List. The summer terms run from May to August.

Wesberg Jeremie, of Vassalboro; Nina Labbe, of Oakland; Blake Laweryson, of North Anson; Tamara Butler, of Madison; Alex Akers, of Madison; River Garling, of Madison; Grace Marshall, of Fairfield; Allison Nickerson, of Fairfield; Jasmine Cayford, of Canaan; Jessica Keay, of Albion; Gregory Jones, of Waterville; Trevor Lovely, of Winslow; Brandie Bryson-Cyrus, of Waterville; Andrew Cronk, of China; and Jamison Bragdon, of Augusta.

Elmira College recognizes annual Key Award recipients

Elmira College, in Elmira, New York, recently announced this year’s recipients of its annual Key Award. This year’s award was given to 807 students in 18 states as well as Canada. The Key Award is presented to outstanding students in their junior year of high school or preparatory school. They include:

Peyton Antone, of Augusta; Elliotte Podey, of China; and Rylee McKay, of Oakland.

“This award is given to students with the potential to excel academically, serve as leaders, and go on to enjoy success in life,” said Charles Lindsay, president of Elmira College. “We hope they will choose to make Elmira College their place.”

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Arnold’s expedition

by Mary Grow

Before continuing upriver, this subseries will summarize the one Revolutionary event that did have a direct impact on towns along the Kennebec River. That was the fall 1775 American expedition intended to take Québec City from the British (who had taken it from the French in September 1759).

In September and October of 1775, Colonel Benedict Arnold led an army of about 1,100 men from Newburyport, Massachusetts, up the Kennebec River, across the Height of Land and down the Chaudiere River to the St. Lawrence.

Among documents at Fairfield’s Cotton Smith House, home of the Fairfield Historical Society, is a 1946 Bangor Daily News article quoting Louise Coburn’s Skowhegan history: she said the army consisted of 10 New England infantry companies and three companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania and Virgina.

(The 1890 Cotton Smith House has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992.)

Scattered partial reenactments of this “march to Québec” are being organized in the fall of 2025. Among organizing groups is the Arnold Expedition Historical Society, headquartered in Pittston’s Reuben Colburn house (built in 1765, a state historic site and on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004).

A personal note: your writer learned about Arnold’s march to Québec when she was very young, through the historical novels of Maine writer Kenneth Roberts. Arundel, published in 1930, tells of the expedition and the unsuccessful attack on the city. Rabble in Arms, published in 1933, is the story of the army’s retreat down the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers and Lake Champlain.

Roberts highly admired General Arnold. Each novel is told from the perspective of a participant looking back to his youth, so there are references to Arnold’s subsequent switch to the British side; but his conduct in 1775 is consistently praised, and his detractors damned.

Captain Peter Merrill, of Arundel, Maine, fictional narrator of Rabble in Arms, explained that he intended to write a history of part of the war, and found Arnold “an inseparable part” of his project. He wrote:

“Benedict Arnold was a great leader: a great general: a great mariner: the most brilliant soldier of the Revolution. He was the bravest man I have ever known. Patriotism burned in him like an unquenchable flame.”

Why, then, did Arnold switch sides in September 1780? To Roberts (and a few others) the answer is, again, patriotism. Having witnessed the incompetence, corruption and general worthlessness of the Congress that mismanaged the war, costing – wasting – too many lives, Arnold believed the country’s salvation required re-submitting to British rule, with competent Americans as administrators, until the colonies were strong enough to revolt successfully.

* * * * * *

Benedict Arnold

Arnold’s army left Massachusetts on Sept. 19, 1775; reached the mouth of the Kennebec the next day; and stopped first at Gardinerstown (later Pittston), south of Augusta. Here 200 wooden bateaux had been hastily built in Reuben Colburn’s shipyard at Agry Point (named for a 1774 settler), on the east bank of the Kennebec.

(An on-line map shows the Colburn House on Arnold Road, and Agry Point Road running south from the south end of Arnold Road and dead-ending on the south side of Morton Brook.)

According to Colburn House information on the Town of Pittston’s website, Colburn had suggested attacking Québec via the Kennebec and had sent General George Washington “critical information.” Given only about three weeks’ notice to provide the bateaux, he had had to use green lumber, which did not hold up well; the boats leaked copiously, and fell apart under rough handling, on the water and on portages.

The website says Colburn himself and some of his crew went upriver with the troops, “carrying supplies and repairing the boats as they traveled.”

Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, wrote that the army moved immediately upriver to Fort Western in future Augusta, where Arnold arrived on Sept. 21. For more than a week, he and some of his officers stayed with Captain James Howard at the fort.

On the evening of Sept. 23, Kingsbury wrote (using Capt. Simeon Thayer’s diary of the expedition for his source), a soldier named John McCormick got into a fight with a messmate at the fort, Reuben Bishop, and shot him. A report in the January-February, 2022, issue of the Kennebec Historical Society’s newsletter says alcohol was involved.

A prompt court-martial ordered McCormick hanged at 3 p.m. Sept. 26. Arnold, however, intervened and forwarded the case to Washington, “with a recommendation for mercy.” The KHS report says McCormick “was sent to a military jail in Boston, where he ultimately died of natural causes.”

On a website called Journey with Murphy reached through Old Fort Western’s website, a descendant of Sergeant Bishop called him “the first casualty of the Arnold expedition.” She wrote that he was born Nov. 2, 1740 (probably in central Massachusetts); enlisted soon after the Battle of Lexington; and served at the siege of Boston before joining Arnold’s expedition.

By her account, McCormick’s quarrel was not with Bishop, but with his (McCormick’s) captain, William Goodrich. After McCormick was thrown out of the house where they were billeted, he shot back into it, hitting Bishop as he lay by the fireside.

Bishop was buried somewhere near the fort. Kingsbury believed Willow Street was later “laid out over his unheeded grave.” His descendant wrote that his body was moved to Fort Western’s cemetery, and was by 2024 in Riverside Cemetery.

On Sept. 24, 1775, James North wrote in his 1870 Augusta history, Arnold sent a small exploring party ahead to collect information about the proposed route. They went most of the way across the Height of Land. North said the party’s guides were Nehemiah Getchell and John Horn, of Vassalboro.

Alma Pierce Robbins mentions in her 1971 Vassalboro history several earlier histories. One, she said, referred to “Berry and Getchell who had been sent forward…,” implying that they were part of, or guides for, the scouting party.

Different sources list other local men as guides for parts of the expedition. WikiTree cites a 1979 letter from a descendant of Dennis Getchell, of Vassalboro (see last week’s article) saying Dennis and three of his brothers, John, Nehemiah and Samuel, were scouts for Arnold, with Arnold’s journals as the source of the information.

Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his 1902 centennial history of Waterville, also named Nehemiah Getchell and John Horn as guides for the exploring party. He added, quoting an unnamed source, that a man named Jackins, who lived north of Teconnet Falls, served as a guide for the expedition.

Major General Carleton Edward Fisher, in his 1970 history of Clinton, wrote that Jackins (Jaquin, Jakens, Jackens, Jakins, Jackquith) was a French (and French-speaking) Huguenot who came to Winslow via Germany around 1772. Fisher believed Arnold sent Jackins to Québec with a letter in November 1775, citing expedition records kept by Arnold and others.

(Your writer, extrapolating from other sources, guesses the letter was to supporters in and around Québec letting them know an expedition was on the way.)

Two Native guides, Natanis and Sabatis (Sabbatis, Sabbatus), are named in several accounts, and in Kenneth Roberts’ novel. Some sources identify them as Abenakis (also called Wabanakis), others specify the Abenaki/Wabanaki band called Norridgewocks. Some say the two men were brothers or cousins.

Robbins called them “guides of no mean ability.” Both spent time in Vassalboro, she wrote, and “there are a few reports of those settlers who actually knew these two Indians.” As of 1971, she said, Sabatis’ name was on a boulder on Oak Grove Seminary grounds. Natanis Golf Course, on Webber Pond Road, was named after the 18th-century Natanis.

North wrote that over the period between Sept. 25 and Sept. 30, Arnold’s men moved from Fort Western to Fort Halifax, some in the bateaux (with most of the supplies) and some marching along the east bank of the river on the rough road laid out in 1754, when the forts were built to deter attacks by Natives backed by the French.

Robbins cited an account that the whole army camped on both sides of the Kennebec, in Vassalboro “while their bateaux were being repaired”; and Arnold “was entertained” at Moses Taber’s house.

(Your writer found no readily available information on Moses Taber. He was probably one of the Tabers who were among Vassalboro’s early settlers. They were Quakers; Taber Hill, the elevation north of Webber Pond about half-way between the Kennebec River and China Lake, is named after them.)

In Winslow, according to Whittemore’s history, an early settler, surveyor, doctor and selectman named John McKechnie treated sick soldiers from Arnold’s army

Above Fort Halifax, there was a miles-long stretch of waterfalls and rapids. Here the men had either to unload the bateaux, carry them past the danger zone, bring up the supplies and reload the boats; or haul the loaded boats upriver, in waist-deep autumn-cold water, against a strong current, over a rocky bottom.

North quoted a letter Arnold sent to George Washington in mid-October in which he compared his men to “amphibious animals, as they were a great part of the time under water.”

Several sources say that while his army labored up-river, Arnold made his headquarters in the first house built in Fairfield, Jonathan Emery’s, a short distance north of the present downtown. The Fairfield bicentennial history says Arnold was there a week; a WikiTree biography says two weeks, during which Emery, a carpenter, helped repair some of the bateaux.

(There will be more about Jonathan Emery and his family in next week’s article.)

By the time the army reached Norridgewock Falls in early October, North wrote (referring to Dr. Isaac Senter’s journal), many of the boats were wrecked. Worse, the wooden casks of bread, fish and peas were soaked and the food ruined, leaving the men with little to eat for the rest of the journey but salt pork, flour and whatever game they could kill.

From Norridgewock, North wrote, it was forty miles to the Great Carrying Place where the army left the Kennebec to go overland to the Dead River. After a very difficult journey (described in more or less detail in numerous sources, including North), during which men died and several companies abandoned the expedition and went home, about 600 remaining soldiers reached the St. Lawrence River on Nov. 9.

They besieged Québec and, with reinforcements, attacked the city the night of Dec. 31 1775. They failed to overcome the defenders, and many men were killed, wounded (including Arnold) or captured.

* * * * * *

Kingsbury summarized one effect of the expedition on the Kennebec Valley in the first of his two chapters on military history. He wrote that “The rare beauty of the valley through which they passed, the waving meadows, the heavy forest growth, made a lasting impression” that was not erased by the much harder journey that followed. The post-war peace brought continued hardship and hunger in the valley as “famishing regiments of soldiers” seized any available food on their way to homes along the coast. It “brought, also, many of the members of the Arnold expedition back as permanent settlers.”

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
Local historical society collections

Websites, miscellaneous.

Army Reserve ambassador for Maine receives public service decoration

U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador Jeffrey Morton, right, of Maine receives the Patriotic Public Service Award July 17 during an annual training workshop. The award was presented by Maj. Gen. Kris A. Belanger, former 99th RD commanding general. U.S. Army photo by Sal Ottaviano, 99th RD Public Affairs

U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador Jeffrey Morton, of Augusta, received the Patriotic Public Service Award July 17 during an annual training workshop held at 99th Readiness Division headquarters, at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The award was presented by Maj. Gen. Kris A. Belanger, former 99th RD commanding general.

Morton retired from military service with over 38 years enlisted and commissioned service. Ambassador Morton’s final assignment was as faculty at the Army War College office for International Students where he was co-developer of the Valley Forge Staff ride. Commissioned a Cavalry Officer, Morton transferred to Engineer where he held positions from Platoon leader to Brigade Command to include combat service in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007 as Engineer Brigade Operations Officer.

Last mobilized in 2017 in support of OEF, Morton remains active in professional, branch, and veterans’ organizations. Joint Qualified, Morton attended and was on the faculty of the Command and General Staff College and is a graduate of the Army War College and Joint Staff College’s Joint and Combined Warfare Course.

The Army Reserve Ambassador Program was established in 1998 to promote awareness of the Army Reserve and to serve as a vital bridge in the nation’s states/communities to further educate and garner support for the Army Reserve. Ambassadors are Special Government Employees who represent the Chief of the Army Reserve without salary, wages or related benefits.

Ambassadors provide Community Outreach assistance to Army Reserve members/families, other military personnel/families as needed.

Area students named to dean’s list at UNE

The following area students have been named to the University of New England’s dean’s list for the spring semester 2025, in Biddeford:

Augusta: Mallory Erickson, Tyler Pelletier, and Nhasino Phan Daraun White. China Village: Nabila Harrington. Fairfield: Caitlyn Mayo. Jefferson: Ava White. Liberty: Mckenzie Kunesh. Madison: Peyton Estes. Oakland: Francesca Caccamo. Sidney: Valerie Capeless and Brady Doucette. Skowhegan: Elizabeth Connelly, Catherine Kelso, Zoe Lambke, and Ashley Mason. South China: Richard Winn. Vassalboro: Adam Ochs. Waterville: Asher Grazulis, Emma Michaud, Grace Petley, Emilee Richards, Elizabeth Schmitt, Caitlyn Smith and Evan Watts. Windsor: Kassidy Barrett.

EVENTS: Make an immediate difference by giving blood or platelets now

The American Red Cross urges all donors to give blood or platelets now to keep the blood supply strong this summer. Type O blood products are most needed on hospital shelves – especially in the face of summer challenges that can quickly cause blood and platelet reserves to drop.

All blood types are needed, and donors who don’t know their blood type can learn it after donation. Book a time to give blood or platelets by visiting RedCrossBlood.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS or by using the Red Cross Blood Donor App.

As a thank-you, all who come to give by July 14, 2025, will receive an exclusive pair of Red Cross x goodr sunglasses, while supplies last. Donors can personalize their one-of-a-kind shades with a blood type sticker that’s included! For details, visit RedCrossBlood.org/goodr.

For those who come to give July 15-31, 2025, the Red Cross will say thanks with a Fandango Movie Reward by email. Use it to catch a summer blockbuster on the Red Cross! See RedCrossBlood.org/July.

Upcoming blood donation opportunities:

Kennebec County:

Augusta

July 28: 11:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., Augusta Elks, 397 Civic Center Drive, P.O. Box 2206

Waterville

July 18: 9 a.m. – 2 p.m., O’Brien’s Event Center, 375 Main St.

Winslow

July 30: noon. – 5 p.m., MacCrillis-Rousseau VFW #8835, 175 Veterans Drive.

Make the world brighter for patients by giving blood

Type O blood donors especially urged to give

As the busy Fourth of July holiday week gets closer, the American Red Cross asks donors to celebrate by making a blood or platelet donation appointment to help power the blood supply through mid-summer. While all blood types are needed, donors with type O blood are most urgently needed.

Making and keeping donation appointments now is critical to ensuring blood products are available for all patients – including those in trauma situations that may require several lifesaving transfusions – in the weeks to come. Type O negative blood is often reached for in emergencies when there isn’t time to match a patient’s blood type. Type O positive is the most common blood type, so it’s important to keep type O blood and all blood types on hand at hospitals for people facing both chronic illness and sudden, life-threatening conditions.

Don’t wait – add a blood or platelet donation appointment to your summer calendar today by visiting RedCrossBlood.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS or by using the Red Cross Blood Donor App.

The Red Cross and goodr are joining forces in July to remind donors they’re just the type patients can count on. All who come to give July 1-14, 2025, will get an exclusive pair of Red Cross x goodr sunglasses, while supplies last. Donors can personalize their one-of-a-kind shades with a blood type sticker! For details, visit RedCrossBlood.org/ goodr.

Upcoming blood donation opportunities June 24-July 14

Kennebec County:

Augusta

Friday, July 11: 9 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., MaineGeneral Health, 35 Medical Center Parkway.
Friday, July 11: 1:30 p.m. – 6 p.m., MaineGeneral Health, 35 Medical Center Parkwa.y
Monday, July 14: 11:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., Augusta Elks, 397 Civic Center Drive, P.O. Box 2206.

Waterville

Friday, July 11: 9 a.m. – 2 p.m., O’Brien’s Event Center, 375 Main St.,

Winslow

Wednesday, July 9: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m., Winslow VFW, 175 Veterans Drive.

WPI announces spring dean’s list

The following locaql students were named to the dean’s list at Worcester Polytechnical Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Kaitlyn Henry, from Augusta, class of 2027, majoring in Computer Science.

Lily Ker, from Waterville, class of 2027, majoring in Interactive Media and Game Development.

Emiko Peck, from Waterville, class of 2028, majoring in Mathematical Sciences.

EVENTS: Summer blood and platelet donations vital to avoid blood supply impact

Receive $15 Amazon.com Gift Card by email, also entered to win $7K gift card for blood donation in June

Disasters like hurricanes and severe summer weather can disrupt blood drives for several days and impact the momentum of a growing blood supply. Help the American Red Cross plan for the unexpected by making an appointment to give blood or platelets.

Even when hospitals are fully stocked with blood products, sudden events can cause a rapid drop in the availability of lifesaving transfusions. The Red Cross asks people to continue making and keeping donation appointments a part of their June plans.

Blood has a shelf life of 42 days, which means ongoing donations are key to ensure medical needs are met. Type O blood donors and those giving platelets are especially needed as the summer season continues.

Upcoming blood donation opportunities will take place in Waterville on Friday, June 20, from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m., at O’Brien’s Event Center, 375 Main St., and in Augusta, on Monday, June 23, 11:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., Augusta Elks, 397 Civic Center Drive, P.O. Box 2206.