The following local students were named to the 2021 fall semester dean’s list at Simmons University, in Boston, Massachusetts. To qualify for dean’s list status, undergraduate students must obtain a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, based on 12 or more credit hours of work in classes using the letter grade system.
Allyson Cunningham, of Augusta; Kaili Shorey, of Vassalboro, Abigail Bloom, of Waterville, and Maddie Beckwith, of Winslow.
Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts, is pleased to recognize those students who distinguish themselves academically during the course of the school year. The following local students were recently named to the University’s dean’s list for the Fall semester, which ended in December 2021.
Augusta resident Mandy Cooper, majoring in business administration.
Augusta resident Lauren Murray, majoring in economics.
Chelsea resident Michael Nicholas, majoring in mechanical engineering/physics. In addition to achieving distinction through the dean’s list, Nicholas is a member of the University Honors Program.
To achieve the dean’s list distinction, students must carry a full program of at least four courses, have a quality point average of 3.5 or greater out of a possible 4.0 and carry no single grade lower than a C- during the course of their college career. Each student receives a letter of commendation and congratulation from their college dean.
St. Michael School Principal Kevin Cullen, standing, with “principal of the day” Natania. (contributed photo)
AUGUSTA, ME — When Natania, a first grader at St. Michael School, in Augusta, was informed she would get to serve as “Principal for a Day” on Tuesday, April 5. Her first thought was to use her newfound “power” to effect positive change.
“She decided to give everyone a dress down day for a donation of $2 or more per person,” said Principal Kevin Cullen. “All of the proceeds would go to the people of Ukraine. Amazing.”
On Tuesday, Natania was welcomed into each classroom with a “Good Morning, Principal Natania” as she made her way around the school collecting donations.
“In total, we raised close to $800 for the people of Ukraine,” said Cullen.
Marianne Pelletier, superintendent of Maine Catholic Schools, even called Natania to thank her for her efforts.
The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt, paying to outfit the soldiers and compensate their families.
The United States Civil War, which began when the Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and ended with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, had the most impact on Maine, including the central Kennebec Valley, of any 17th or 18th century war.
Nonetheless, your writer’s original plan was to write only a single article about the Civil War. As usual, she found an oversupply of material that she hopes will interest readers as it interested her; but she still limits coverage to two articles, for three reasons.
The first and most important reason to downplay Civil War history is that unlike, say, the War of 1812, the Civil War is already familiar. Citizens who know nothing about the Sept. 13, 1814, bombardment of Fort McHenry (which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem) recognize at least the names of battles like Bull Run and Gettysburg. Many people can name at least one Civil War general; few can name one from the War of 1812.
A second point is that numerous excellent histories of the Civil War are readily available, including books specifically about Maine’s role.
And the third reason is that this war is recent enough that some readers undoubtedly have memories of their grandparents telling stories of the generation before them who fought in the Civil War.
Any reader who would like to share a family Civil War story is invited to write it, attach photographs if available and email to townline@townline.org., Att. Roland Hallee. Maximum length is 1,000 words. Submissions will be printed as space permits; the editor reserves the right to reject any article and/or photograph.
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Maine historians agree that the majority of state residents supported President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to fight to preserve the Union. Those who initially disagreed, James W. North wrote in his history of Augusta, found themselves a small enough minority so they either changed their views or moderated their expression.
By 1860, the telegraph was widely used. News of Fort Sumter reached Augusta the same day, followed two days later by Lincoln’s call for 75,000 three-months volunteers, including one regiment from Maine.
On April 22, North wrote, the Maine legislature, in a hastily-called special session, approved enrolling 10,000 soldiers in ten regiments for three years, plus “a State loan of one million dollars.”
Augusta had filled two companies by the end of April. Other Kennebec Valley companies joined them; they camped and drilled on the State House lawn. The Third Regiment started south June 5, 1861; those soldiers were promptly replaced by others from other parts of Maine, volunteers succeeded by men paid bounties and in 1863 by draftees.
North wrote that the first draft in Augusta was held July 14 through 21, 1863, starting two days after the New York City draft riots began, with news arriving hourly. In Augusta’s Meonian Hall, eligible men’s names were drawn from a wheel by a blindfolded man named James M. Meserve, “a democrat of known integrity and fairness, who possessed the general confidence.”
The process began with selection of 40 men from Albion. Augusta followed, and, North wrote, the initial nervousness gave way to “a general feeling of merriment,” with draftees being applauded and congratulated.
Being drafted did not mean serving, North pointed out. Physical standards were strict; out of 3,540 draftees, 1,050 were “rejected by surgeon for physical disability or defects.” It was also legal to pay a substitute or to pay the government to be let off.
Augusta remained a military hub and a supply depot through the war, centered around the State House and Camp Keyes, on Winthrop Hill, at the top of Winthrop Street. There were large hospital buildings on Western Avenue, North wrote, which were so crowded by 1863 that the Camp Keyes barracks were also fitted up as hospital wards. The trotting park between the State House and the river was named Camp Coburn and hosted infantry and cavalry barracks and enlarged stables.
North described the celebratory homecomings for soldiers returning to Augusta when their enlistments were up, like the one in August 1863 for the 24th Regiment. The “bronzed and war-worn” men had come from Port Hudson, Louisiana, up the Mississippi to Cairo and by train to Augusta, a two-week trip. Greeted by cannon-fire, bells, torch-carrying fire companies, a band, state and city officials and “a multitude” of cheering citizens, they marched straight to the State House, enjoyed a meal in the rotunda and “dropped to sleep on the floor around the tables, being too weary to proceed to Camp Keyes.”
Historians describing the effects of the Civil War on smaller Kennebec Valley towns tend to emphasize two points: the human cost and the financial cost.
Ruby Crosby Wiggin found as she researched the history of Albion a record saying that “out of 100 men who went to war from the town of Albion, 45 didn’t come back.” She listed the names of more than 150 Albion soldiers, six identified as lieutenants.
By 1862, Wiggin wrote, the state and many towns offered enlistment bonuses. In addition, towns paid to equip each soldier. Total Albion expenditures, she wrote, were $21,265; the state reimbursed the town $8,033.33.
Wiggin concluded, “No wonder the town was heavily in debt at the close of the Civil War.”
The China bicentennial history says almost 300 men from that town served in Civil War units. The author quoted from the 1863 school report that said attendance in one district school was unusually low, “the large boys having gone to the war.”
The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt. The China history says when the State of Maine began tallying municipal costs and offering compensation in 1868, China had paid $47,735.34 to provide soldiers. The state repayment was $12,708.33, and town meetings were still dealing with interest payments and debt repayments into the latter half of the 1870s.
China town meetings during the war were mostly about meeting enlistment quotas, and, the history writer implied, by 1864 voters were tired of the topic. In July and again in December 1864, they delegated filling the quota to their select board.
When the late-1864 quota had not been filled by February 1865, voters were explicit; the history writer said they agreed to “sustain the Selectmen in any measures they may take in filling the quota of this town.”
The Fairfield historians who wrote the town’s 1988 bicentennial history found the list of Civil War soldiers too long to include in their book and noted that the names are on the monument in the Veterans Memorial Park and in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) record books in the public library across Lawrence Avenue from the park.
Of Larone, the northernmost and likely the smallest of the seven villages that made up the Town of Fairfield for part of the 19th century, the history says, “Larone furnished her full quota of ‘boys in blue’. These averaged one for every family, three-fifths were destined never to see their homes again.”
Millard Howard, in his Palermo history, wrote that “The Civil War was by far the most traumatic experience this town ever experienced.” Of an 1860 population of 1,372, 46 men, “or one out of every 30 inhabitants,” died between 1861 and 1865.
Looking back from the year 2015, Howard wrote somberly, “No other war can remotely compare with it.”
He listed the names of the dead, with ages and causes of death where known. The youngest were 18, the oldest 44. More than half, 26, died of disease rather than wounds; Augustus Worthing, age 31, starved to death in Salisbury prison, in North Carolina.
Sidney voters spent a lot of town meetings in the 1860s talking about the war, according to Alice Hammond’s town history. As early as 1861, they approved abating taxes for volunteers.
As the war went on, voters authorized aid for volunteers’ families and monetary inducements to enlist for residents and non-residents, with preference given to residents. At an 1863 special meeting, they authorized selectmen to borrow money as needed “to aid families of volunteers.”
Hammond noted that Sidney was debt-free before the war, “but in 1865 it issued bonds for $24,000, a debt from which it recovered very slowly.”
Alma Pierce Robbins found from military records that 410 men from Vassalboro enlisted for Civil War service. From census records, she listed the 1860 population as 3,181.
As in other municipalities, voters approved wartime expenses. Robbins wrote that $7,900 was appropriated for bounties and aid to soldiers’ families in 1861. The comparable 1863 figure was $16,900. Perhaps for contrast, she added the 1864 cost of the new bridge at North Vassalboro (presumably over Outlet Stream): $1,057.82 (plus an 1867 appropriation of $418.62).
In Waterville, General Isaac Sparrow Bangs wrote in his chapter on military history in Reverend Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 centennial history, recruiting offices opened soon after the news of Fort Sumter. A Waterville College student named Charles A. Henrickson was the first to enroll, and, Bangs wrote, his example “proved so irresistibly contagious at the college that the classes and recitations were broken up” and the college temporarily closed.
Henrickson was captured at the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861. He survived the war; later in the Waterville history, Chas. A. Henrickson is listed among charter members of the Waterville Savings Bank, organized in 1869.
These Waterville soldiers became companies G and H in the 3rd Maine Infantry, Bangs wrote. After drilling in Waterville, they went to Augusta and were put under the command of regimental Colonel Oliver O. Howard. On June 5, Howard was ordered to Washington, “carrying with him, as Waterville’s first contingent, seventy-four of her boys into the maelstrom of war.”
Bangs spent years verifying the names of 421 men who either enlisted from Waterville or were Waterville natives who enlisted elsewhere. The names are included in Whittemore’s history.
Bangs added that the Maine Adjutant-General’s report says Waterville provided 525 soldiers. He offered several explanations for the discrepancy, pointing out the difficulties of accurate record-keeping.
Waterville paid $67,715 in enlistment bounties, Bangs wrote. Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, put the figure at $68,016 and said the state reimbursement was $19,888.33.
Linwood Lowden wrote in the history of Windsor that more than one-third of Windsor men aged 17 to 50 fought in the Civil War, most of them in the19th and 21st Maine infantry regiments.
Like other towns, Windsor paid bonuses to enlistees and, Lowden wrote, $2,663.87 “in aid to soldiers’ families…from 1862 through 1866.” He added that Windsor first went into debt during these years.
Camp Keyes, Augusta
A history of Camp Keyes found on-line says that the 70-acre site on top of Winthrop Hill, on the west side of Augusta, had been used as, and called, “the muster field” since before Maine became a state in 1820. It was still available, although the militia had become less significant, when the Civil War broke out.
On Aug. 20, 1862, Maine Adjutant General John L. Hodsdon designated the field one of Maine’s three official “rendezvous areas” for militia and volunteers and named it Camp E. D. Keyes, in honor of Major-General Erasmus D. Keyes, a Massachusetts native who moved to Kennebec County (town unspecified on line) as a young man. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1832 and fought in the Civil War until 1863, when a superior removed him from command, claiming he lacked aggressiveness.
(The other two Maine rendezvous areas were Camp Abraham Lincoln, in Portland, and Camp John Pope [honoring General John Pope from Kentucky], in Bangor.)
Thousands of Civil War soldiers from Maine passed through Camp Keyes. It also housed Maine’s only federal military hospital, named Cony Hospital in honor of Governor Samuel Cony.
After the war, the site remained a militia training ground. The State of Maine bought it in 1888. In 1893 the militia became the National Guard and continued to use the training ground, with Guard headquarters in the Capitol building until 1938.
The on-line site gives an undated description: “Small buildings were constructed of plywood for mess halls, kitchens, latrines, store houses, and lodging for senior military officers. Companies pitched their tents on pads that had been built.”
Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
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).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).
Websites, miscellaneous.
Front row, from left to right, Jacob Blais, Willow Mudie, Scarlotte Mudie, Elizabeth Blais, and Tom Carey. Back, Fr. John Skehan, Anthony Fortin, Ian Martin, Connor Poirier and Tristan Morton. (contributed photo)
Augusta Scouts from Scout Troops #631 and #603 joined with Cub Scout Packs #684 and #603 at St. Mary’s Church, in Augusta, on February 6, as part of the annual celebration of Scout Sunday.
Scouts joined parish leaders in distributing bulletins to parishioners, assisting with the offering, altar service, and recited both the Scout Oath and Law for the assembled congregation. Fr. John Skehan officiated and made the Scouts feel very welcome.
“Not every family attends the same church, but every Scout is taught to respect the religious freedom we enjoy in the United States. Our Scouts, today – on Scout Sunday, participated in this Catholic Mass and through this experience learned to appreciate the Catholic Faith,” said Scout leader Jeff Morton. “St. Mary’s Church and Father John opened their doors and hearts to our scouts. We were welcomed, allowed to participate, and learned so that our scouts can better understand their community and its religious culture.
Diversity, and tolerance are fostered through understanding and respect – this is what Scouting teaches.” According to District Chairman Joe Shelton, the BSA asks its members to affirm a belief in God. That doesn’t mean the Boy Scouts of America tells its members which religion to practice. Scouting provides youth members with opportunities to deepen their personal faith through programs such as the Scout Sunday event, leadership positions in their troop such as chaplain, and the religious emblems program. Scouts have a “Duty to God” and the Scout Law’s 12th and final point is that a “Scout is Reverent.” Lord Robert Baden Powell, founder of the worldwide Scouting movement, said in 1908, “No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws. So every Scout should have a religion.”
Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts, is pleased to recognize those students who distinguish themselves academically during the course of the school year. The following local students were recently named to the University’s dean’s list for the Fall semester, which ended in December 2021.
Augusta resident Mandy Cooper, majoring in business administration.
Augusta resident Lauren Murray, majoring in economics.
Chelsea resident Michael Nicholas, majoring in mechanical engineering/physics. In addition to achieving distinction through the dean’s list, Nicholas is a member of the University Honors Program.
To achieve the dean’s list distinction, students must carry a full program of at least four courses, have a quality point average of 3.5 or greater out of a possible 4.0 and carry no single grade lower than a C- during the course of their college career. Each student receives a letter of commendation and congratulation from their college dean.
The Block House at Fort Kent, on the Canadian border, in 1839, at the time of the Aroostook War.
The end of the American Revolution did not end enmity between Britain and its former colonies. They fought one more war, the War of 1812 (June 18, 1812 – Feb. 18, 1815).
Even after that war, the border between the United States and British Canada remained partly unsettled until the Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846. In the interim, one eastern border disagreement reached the point where it, too, is called (or miscalled; some historians insist it was a mere incident) a war, the Aroostook War (1839-1840).
The next articles in this series will talk about the War of 1812 and the Aroostook War.
From 1806 on, relations among the United States, Britain and other European belligerents, and within the United States between the pro-British Federalist party and the pro-French Democratic Party, became increasingly unfriendly. The United States banned imports in British ships; the British retaliated by attacks on American shipping.
Louis Hatch’s 1919 Maine history includes an interesting summary of the War of 1812. He discussed both the anti-war sentiment that was significant in all of New England and the ways many Maine people supported the war.
Although anti-war Federalists dominated in Augusta in the years before 1812, they were a minority in Kennebec County, the District of Maine and the United States, James North wrote in his Augusta history. He said Maine reportedly furnished more enlisted soldiers in proportion to population than any other state, and patriotically paid war taxes Congress required.
Casual students of Maine history probably think the war’s effects were limited to coastal and Downeast Maine – the British seized Castine and Machias and went up the Penobscot as far as present-day Bangor.
For some local historians, that view seemed accurate. For example, Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins gave the War of 1812 one sentence, saying it was unimportant to Vassalboro officials, perhaps because it wasn’t really a war. (Hatch, however, listed Vassalborough and Waterville as towns whose voters rejected proposals to petition the federal government to repeal the embargo on international trade.)
Similarly, in the town of Harlem, now China, the 1974 town history says that “There are no records of war casualties. The Harlem town records show no extraordinary political or financial effects.”
Others, notably Augusta historians North and Charles Elventen Nash, found that the War of 1812 had major and lamentable economic, personal and political effects. Nash and North wrote at length about the war, because both were detail-oriented and, perhaps, because Augusta was then the largest town in the area.
In his 1870 history, North wrote that as early as 1806, the war between Britain and France made Maine settlers fear the United States government would be forced to abandon the policy of neutrality that was commercially beneficial. Anticipating trouble, he said, Kennebec Valley people began thinking in military terms – hence, for example, the 1806 organization of Augusta’s first military company, the Augusta Light Infantry.
North called the Light Infantry Augusta’s “first independent company.” His account of the ladies of Augusta presenting a company standard on Sept. 11, 1806, says the cavalry and artillery units were waiting when the uniformed infantrymen arrived to receive a white silk standard with “Victory or Death” inscribed in red.
In December 1807 Congress passed the Embargo Act prohibiting United States exports to Europe. The act was a disaster for businessmen trading overseas, including many Kennebec Valley merchants and ship-builders; stopping trade stopped their livelihoods.
“[T]heir ships instead of making profitable voyages lay decaying at the wharves, and financial distress and in many cases bankruptcy followed,” Nash wrote.
On Aug. 20, 1808, voters at a special Augusta town meeting petitioned President Thomas Jefferson to repeal the embargo. Debate was spirited, North wrote; when the vote was taken, only seven men dissented.
A nine-man committee drafted a petition that was approved and forwarded to Washington. North quoted President Jefferson’s Sept. 10 reply defending the embargo and reminding Augusta residents that only Congress could repeal it unless the European powers first abandoned their anti-trade edicts and actions.
On Jan. 16, 1809, Augusta voters acted on a broader resolution condemning the embargo, a war with Britain and creation of a standing army. The vote was 85 in favor to 23 opposed, North wrote.
Nathan Weston
In 1810, North wrote, the Federalists and the Democrats held separate Fourth of July celebrations. The Democrats met in front of a Grove Street house to hear Nathan Weston’s speech; the Federalists, with the Augusta Light Infantry, paraded around the city, including past the Democratic gathering, “courteously suspending their music as they passed.”
(Nathan Weston was then a district judge; he was later an Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. See The Town Line, Dec. 10, 2020.)
The Federalists’ parade was followed by a banquet at a Hallowell tavern, in a room decorated with 17 wreaths for the 17 United States. North wrote that Virginia’s wreath included a hornet’s nest, “representing the stinging nature of her democracy.” A candle set the nest on fire and freed the hornets.
President James Madison continued the embargo and on June 18, 1812, signed the Congressionally-approved declaration of war with Great Britain.
The news reached Augusta around the beginning of July. Local Federalist party leaders and press denounced the declaration – North quoted the words “iniquitous, ruinous and not to be tolerated.” President Madison was hanged in effigy, and a fast in protest was held July 23.
Historian Henry Kingsbury added that federal troops stationed in Augusta were ready to counter the local reaction, “and but for the action of the civil authorities the episode must have closed with bloodshed.”
War worsened an already-bad economic situation in the Kennebec Valley. In Augusta, North summarized:
“The streams of prosperity were dried at their source, and in the general depression which followed Augusta had her full measure of distress; her wheels of industry in a measure stopped, her navigation dwindled, and her trade nearly ceased; and for many years her prosperity and growth were greatly retarded.”
Nash agreed, describing a “steady, visible decline” in business from 1807 to 1814.
Both historians saw 1813 as the low point. That year, Nash said, no new ships and very few new houses were built in town.
“Large and numerous piles of manufactured lumber ready for shipment cumbered the banks of the river, and there gradually deteriorated into a condition of little value,” Nash wrote. North added that downtown Augusta was ruined. By 1813, he wrote, “The town presented…a desolate appearance.”
Five major stores in brick buildings had closed, he said; only one store was still in business, Nash added. North wrote that the downtown buildings were owned by out-of-towners, some from the area, one from Massachusetts, one from Maryland.
On June 8, 1813, an Augusta-owned ship with an Augusta cargo was seized by a British ship. Captain and crew were promptly released, but the ship and cargo went to Nova Scotia.
Nash found that in 1808, 1809 and 1810, Augusta businessmen owned more than 1,000 tons of shipping. By 1817, three years after the war ended, the figure was less than 100 tons.
The war caused inflation. North offered sample retail price comparisons between 1811/12 and May 1813, including corn rising from a maximum of $1.28 to $1.70 and flour from $11 to $17 (he gave no measurements; corn per bushel and flour per barrel seem probable).
The beginning of 1814, he wrote, “was gloomy in the extreme; all imported articles continued extravagantly high. Breadstuffs were scarce and difficult to obtain, and a spirit of speculation was rife, induced by exorbitant and fluctuating prices.” There was considerable smuggling; the few remaining Augusta merchants were occasional participants.
Waterville residents, too, reacted to the 1807 embargo, historian Edwin Carey Whittemore wrote. They called a town meeting (no date is given) that was intended to approve a petition to the federal government to rescind the embargo and allow trade; “but the spirit of patriotism prevailed and the town authorized a resolution approving the Embargo” and appointed a committee to write and send it.
Soon afterwards, Whittemore wrote, another meeting authorized a powder magazine in the meeting-house loft, “probably as the driest place available.”
Otherwise, Whittemore ignored the war and skipped to 1814, when, he wrote, one of the Waterville shipyards launched “the largest ship ever built here,” the 290-ton “Francis and Sarah”. After the war, Waterville became a hub of water-borne trade on the Kennebec.
The war ended with the Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814. North wrote the news reached Augusta Feb. 11, 1815, where it ignited “the liveliest demonstrations of joy. Bells were rung and bonfires kindled….” There was another celebration Feb. 14, a religious service of thanksgiving Feb. 22 and on April 13 a “national thanksgiving.”
In the next months, he wrote, commerce revived, but taxes to cover war costs continued: “a direct tax on lands and dwelling-houses, and specific taxes on household furniture, watches and stamps, on retailers, manufacturers and carriages.”
Augusta got a belated bonus from the War of 1812: the federal government built the Kennebec Arsenal between 1828 and 1838, as the disputed Maine-Canada boundary kept relations with Britain uneasy.
A 1997 article by Maine historians Marius B. Peladeau and Roger G. Reed (found on line) explains that the events of 1812-1814 showed how easily a naval power like Britain could disrupt water transport of war supplies to the Maine frontier from the nearest arsenal, in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Therefore, on March 3, 1827 (10 days after Governor Enoch Lincoln approved the state law making Augusta Maine’s capital, Peladeau and Reed commented), President John Quincy Adams signed a law ordering the Secretary of the Army to site and build an arsenal at Augusta.
An Army engineer chose a 40-acre lot on the east bank of the Kennebec. The plan expanded from a “depot” for supplies from Massachusetts to “an arsenal complex large enough to fabricate military supplies and be semi-independent” if communication with Massachusetts were interrupted.
Congress tripled the initial $15,000 appropriation to $45,000, and, Peladeau and Reed wrote, the cornerstone for the first of 15 buildings was laid June 14, 1828. Ten of the buildings were of “unhammered granite, laid in ashlar courses, from the already famous nearby Hallowell quarry.” The rest were wooden.
“As is so often the case when the government is involved,” the authors observed, there were cost overruns. On March 27, 1829, Congress added another $45,000 to the arsenal budget.
Peladeau and Reed described the main building as 100 by 30 feet, three stories high with a “spacious basement.” It had room for 142,760 muskets. Nearby were two powder magazines, officers’ quarters, barracks, a guard house, a stable and “shops for the blacksmiths, armorers and wheelwrights.”
An eight-foot-high iron fence on a granite foundation surrounded the entire lot. There was a granite retaining wall along the river and, not finished until 1833 or later, a granite wharf “at which vessels drawing ten feet of water could dock even when the river experienced its lowest level during a summer’s drought.”
The Arsenal’s second commander, James W. Ripley (who took over May 31, 1833), persuaded the government to add another 20 acres and extend the fence around the new area. Ripley oversaw construction of a “spring-fed reservoir” near the commander’s quarters, with a large enough pool so trout and salmon could swim in it. “Whether these delicacies were for the sole enjoyment of the commander and his officers, or whether they were shared with the enlisted men, is left to the imagination of the reader,” Peladeau and Reed wrote.
The Arsenal was a military facility until the early 1900s, when the federal government gave it to the state. It was part of the Augusta Mental Health Institute until the late 1900s.
In 2000, the Arsenal was designated a National Historic Landmark District. The on-line list of Maine’s historic places calls it “a good example of a nearly intact early 19th-century munitions storage facility.”
Peladeau and Reed’s piece was intended to help historic preservation groups decide what to do with the eight granite buildings remaining in 1997. “All in a chaste and simple style, they stand today as among the best surviving examples of the military architecture of the period,” the historians wrote.
Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Websites, miscellaneous.
Susanne Bouchard stands in the unfinished pool. (photo by Greg Glynn)
When Susanne Bouchard came to Maine from Germany in 1984, she was surprised there weren’t more warm water pools or spas like she had seen in Europe. If she can raise $300,000, that will soon change.
As a Physical Therapist and Licensed Massage therapist for more than 45 years, Susanne’s life mission has been to build a 92-degree warm water pool and spa in Augusta.
As the Founder and CEO of Advanced Health Physical Therapy and Fitness, in Waterville and Augusta, she knows from her years of experience how water therapy can help patients who suffer from pain, obesity, multiple sclerosis, dementia, arthritis, Parkinson’s and other chronic conditions.
Susanne Bouchard
Bouchard says Maine has one of the oldest populations in the country. This was one of the reasons she started her mission in 2007 to build a warm water pool in Augusta. However, when she started fundraising for the pool at 160 Riverside Drive in Augusta, the 2008 recession quickly halted fundraising and plans were put on hold.
During the past 15 years, Bouchard has forged ahead, reaching out to more members of the community to help build the pool. Donations have come from bottle drives, cookie sales and larger corporate donations. One of her most popular ways to raise money is through donating a brick to the construction of the pool. Bricks range from $500-$1,000 and can be purchased in a person’s name or in memory of a loved one. Bouchard has also tried to reach out to local businesses and secure grants, but it has been tough, especially because of the economy and the pandemic.
Today, the physical pool is still under construction supported by the $1 million she has raised, but the COVID-19 pandemic has again deterred her work. The rising cost of materials and construction has impacted the plans to finish the pool, so it sits empty.
One example says Bouchard is the dehumidification system. In the past two years, the cost of the system went up by more than $40,000. This is one reason why raising the money now is more urgent than ever.
Bouchard also says patients and the community are waiting desperately for the interior of the pool to be finished. Her goal is to complete the project by the end of 2022, but she still needs $300,000.
The winter months are especially tough on the elderly, who are less active and don’t get the exercise they need to stay healthy. It’s not just the older population that is waiting.
Trisha Audette, of Winthrop, says, “My body is like a tin man that runs out of oil, so I need that heat during the winter and that’s why I am on board helping out for the pool because it will help so many people that I know, and so many people that I don’t know. It will help children, teenagers, adults, elderly people, it will be beneficial for any age.”
Once built the pool will be open to the public, with affordable membership options ranging from day passes to annual or life-time membership. The Healing Waters Pool is anticipated to bring people to Augusta from across the region and entire state, which would have a positive impact on the local economy.
Hot tub. (photo by Greg Glynn)
The plans for the Healing Waters Pool will include a large wheelchair ramp, making it easy for anyone to get in and out of the pool. Bouchard said many of the local area pools don’t have a 104°F hot tub, 55-65°F cold water tub, which allows for patients to experience a contrast bath. This helps to increase blood flow and promotes healing; it also helps boost the immune system.
The Healing Waters Pool will be a salt-water pool, better for people who have lung or skin conditions and can’t tolerate chlorine. The 92-degree warm water will be warmer than any pool in the region because she wants it to be gentle on muscles, joints and bones. The large saltwater pool will also feature five special massaging jets that are specifically placed for the neck and back. The pool will also have handicap men and women locker rooms and a sauna.
The community facility will also have a gym with a basketball court. Bouchard’s vision is a place where health and fitness can go hand-in-hand with fun and education for all ages. Bouchard gives tours of the pool and facility to anyone who is interested in learning more or donating.
“If everybody just gives $5 or $10 a month, it could make a big difference. I am also trying to find local businesses and sponsors that can help make this dream come true. We offer a lot of fundraising options, including signage inside the pool. If you know anyone or a business that can help, please tell them we would love their support,” said Bouchard.
The Healing Waters Pool is a division of Light of Life Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. People can donate in person at Advanced Physical Therapy locations in Augusta and Waterville, mail a check to the Healing Waters Pool, 160 Riverside Drive, Augusta ME 04330, or donate online at HealingWatersMaine.com.
John Chandler
After the Revolutionary War, the demobilization of the army increased the population of the Kennebec Valley. This article and the following will describe some of the Revolutionary veterans who became part of local history, chosen more or less randomly. A visit to old cemeteries in area towns would undoubtedly add more names.
In her history of the South Solon meeting house, Mildred Cummings explained that many demobilized soldiers from southern New England came to the District of Maine for its inexpensive land. Such a move would be especially appealing to younger sons who, until after the new United States government and laws took effect, could expect the family farm to be inherited by their oldest brother.
(Solon is farther up the Kennebec River, outside the area of this study, but friends have assured this writer its meeting house is worth a visit.)
The number of central Kennebec Valley settlers, veterans and others, who came from New Hampshire and Massachusetts substantiates Cummings’ explanation.
Kingsbury added, in his Kennebec County history, that survivors of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 march to Québec remembered the Kennebec Valley as a beautiful place with land and timber resources, and some brought their families to live there.
One such was Colonel Jabez Mathews (1743-1828), according to the Waterville centennial history. Mathews went up the Kennebec with Arnold’s expedition, returned to his home town of Gray and in 1794 brought his two young sons with him to Waterville, where he was a tavern-keeper.
The Waterville history includes a chapter on military history written by Brevet Brigadier General Isaac Sparrow Bangs. After much research, he and collaborators came up with a list of more than two dozen Revolutionary War veterans with a connection to Waterville, the majority men who settled there after the war.
Ernest Marriner wrote a brief piece (reproduced on line) in which he said only two men enlisted from the small Waterville/Winslow settlement, John Cool from the Waterville side of the Kennebec and Simeon Simpson from the Winslow side.
With his essay is a photo of the memorial tablet in the Waterville Public Library listing 24 Revolutionary veterans in Waterville, most, obviously, men who came after the war. His list and Bangs’ list are similar but not identical.
The first man Bangs mentioned (he is not on the memorial tablet) was Captain Dean Bangs (May 31, 1756 – Dec. 6, 1845), a Massachusetts native who was a mariner before the war, a privateer in 1775 and for two years beginning in 1776, a soldier in Abijah Bangs’ company in Colonel Dike’s regiment (probably Colonel Nicholas Dike, of the Massachusetts militia).
In 1802 Bangs bought “a large tract of land” in Sidney, part of it overlooking the Kennebec River, where he farmed and “reared a large family.” Waterville was his “mercantile home.”
Elkanah Bangs
As of the 1902 history’s publication, he and some of his family were buried in a private cemetery on his land. A memorial in the cemetery said that Dean Bangs’ father, Elkanah Bangs, was a privateer in the Revolution who was captured and died “on the Jersey prison ship at Wallabout Bay, New York, in July 1777, aged 44 years.”
(Since the memorial was erected by Dean Bangs’ grandson Isaac Sparrow, this writer concludes that the Isaac Sparrow Bangs who wrote the chapter is related to Elkanah and Dean Bangs.)
John Cool, for whom, according to Bangs and Marriner, Waterville’s Cool Street is named, enlisted in the Continental Army from Winslow on March 12, 1777, and was discharged March 12, 1780. In 1835, “on a paper” (perhaps concerning a pension?) he said he was 78 years old and had lived in by-then-Waterville for 70 years. He lived on Cool Street another 10 years, dying Oct. 5, 1845, six months after he turned 89.
Sampson Freeman, “a free man of color,” was another Continental Army veteran who served his three years, from Feb. 1, 1777, to Feb. 5, 1780, including service at Valley Forge dated June 1778 (the month the army moved out of that encampment). Freeman enlisted from Salem, Massachusetts; after the war he lived in Peru, Maine, before moving to Waterville in 1835, where he died in 1843.
Asa Redington
Asa Redington (Dec. 22, 1761 – March 31, 1845), according to records Bangs and colleagues found, enlisted from New Hampshire in June 1778 and was discharged in December; in June 1779 re-enlisted for a year; in March 1781 enlisted for the third time.
He served in New England the first two terms, and after March 1781 went with the army to Yorktown. After Cornwallis surrendered, Bangs wrote, Redington came back north with the army to West Point, where on Dec. 23, 1783, he was discharged “without pay, and left to travel 300 miles to his home, carrying the musket he had borne during his long service.”
Redington moved to Vassalboro in 1784, married into the Getchell family, and in 1792 moved to Waterville for the rest of his life. The musket, Bangs wrote, remained in the family for years, until Redington’s oldest son gave it to the State of Maine.
Marriner added that Redington, with his father-in-law, Nehemiah Getchell, built the first dam at Ticonic Falls. Redington became a mill owner, added “a shipyard and store, and accumulated more land.”
He was the Justice of the Peace who convened Waterville’s first town meeting, held on July 26, 1802. The Redington Museum is in the Silver Street house that he built in 1814 for one of his sons.
Another prominent Waterville veteran was Dr. Obadiah Williams (March 21, 1752 – June 1799). The second of Waterville’s early physicians, he enlisted from Epping, New Hampshire, and was at Bunker Hill as a surgeon in Major General John Stark’s regiment in the Continental Army. He served for the duration of the war and came to Winslow in 1792. Several sources say he built the first frame house on the west (later Waterville) side of the Kennebec.
Daniel Cony
Augusta also had Revolutionary veterans among its early settlers. One of the most prominent was Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan. 21, 1842). He has been mentioned in several previous articles, notably as the founder of Cony Female Academy, opened in 1816 and closed in 1857 (see The Town Line, Sept. 2, 2021, for a summary history of the Academy and a brief biography of Daniel Cony).
A Massachusetts native, Cony was a physician practicing in Shutesbury when the Revolutionary fighting began at Lexington and Concord. North wrote in his history of Augusta that Cony enrolled in the Massachusetts militia in the fall of 1776 and joined General Horatio Gates’ army at Saratoga, New York.
North tells the story of an early adventure: a leader was needed to cross an area exposed to fire from a British battery, and he volunteered. “[T]he young adjutant at the head of his men by his wary approach drew the enemy’s fire, felt the wind of their balls, then dashed forward with his command unharmed.”
Cony and his family came to Augusta (then Hallowell) in 1778. His many public positions after the war included town clerk and selectman in Hallowell; member in both houses of the Massachusetts General Court; member of the Massachusetts electoral college when George Washington was elected to his second term as president of the United States; delegate to Maine’s 1819 Constitutional Convention; member of the new Maine legislature and of the Maine executive council; and Kennebec County probate judge.
Consistent with his enthusiasm for education, after the Massachusetts legislature chartered Hallowell Academy in 1791 (during one of his terms as a legislator), he became a member of the first board of trustees; and he was an overseer of Bowdoin College, founded in 1794, for its first three years.
On Oct, 17, 1797, in honor of the anniversary of Burgoyne’s surrender, he began building a new house. That house burned June 13, 1834. The same year he built a new one, described on a Museum in the Streets plaque as “a double brick visible on the hill behind the fort,” where he died.
In 1815, renowned portrait painter Gilbert Stuart did portraits of Cony and his wife, Susanna Curtis Cony, according to an on-line Central Maine newspapers report dated May 1918. In 1917, the Cony Alumni Association obtained permission to replicate Cony’s portrait (the original belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Art). The resulting canvas print, framed, was hung in the Cony High School library in August 2017, according to the report.
Seth Pitts, Jr. (1754 – Aug. 22, 1846), and his younger brother, Shubael Pitts (1766-1849), were born in Taunton, Massachusetts, and both served in the Revolution. Their parents moved to Hallowell before 1781.
Seth married Elizabeth Lewis from Canton, Massachusetts. Shubael married twice, each time to one of midwife Martha Ballard’s assistants. His first wife was Parthenia Barton (1772- Sept. 4, 1794), from Vassalboro; an on-line history says Martha Ballard was “in attendance” at her death. On July 28, 1796, Shubael Pitts married Sally Cox or Cocks (born 1770).
Shubael made his living as a blacksmith, with his shop on the east side of Water Street, in Augusta. Sally “operated a boarding home for debtors in the same area,” the on-line history says.
When Augusta’s first militia company was established in 1796, Shubael Pitts was one of four captains, according to Kingsbury. (Another was Thomas Pitts, who was born too late to fight in the Revolution but was active in the War of 1812.)
The on-line history says Shubael and Sally are buried in Augusta’s Kling Cemetery (also called the Reed-Cony Cemetery, on the east side of West River Road [Route 104]). Parthenia is buried in Mount Vernon Cemetery (identified as “the old section” of Mount Hope Cemetery).
One of the veterans who spent his last years in Augusta had an unusual service record. Ephraim Leighton (January 1763 – March 15, 1851) first visited the area with his father, Benjamin Leighton, “when there were but three houses in Augusta,” according to Kingsbury. Coming from Edgecomb, they went on to Mount Vernon “by blazed trees” and settled there, Kingsbury wrote.
By May 1776, according to an on-line source, Ephraim was back in Edgecomb, because it was from there that, at the age of 11 (according to the source; 13, by this writer’s math), he enlisted in Captain Henry Tibbetts’ company in a Massachusetts regiment “and served as a waiter to Capt. Tibbetts.” He was discharged in November 1776, but despite his brief and not very military service he was later awarded a pension.
Leighton married Esther Tibbetts on Nov, 23, 1789, in Rome. He was a farmer in Rome and Mount Vernon, moved as far north as Parkman and after about 1813 lived in Augusta. He is buried in the city’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 24 or 25, 1841) was another Revolutionary War veteran who came to Augusta late in life. Born in Epping, New Hampshire, third son of a blacksmith who died in 1776, in 1777, at age 15, he joined the Continental Army. He was captured by the British, escaped, was captured again in May 1779 and escaped in September. Returning to Epping, he promptly re-enlisted.
At some point he served at Fort Detroit, in what is now Detroit, Michigan, under future Secretary of War (in Thomas Jefferson’s administration) Henry Dearborn. Dearborn thought enough of the illiterate youngster to lend him money to buy a farm in Monmouth in the District of Maine, where Chandler and his wife Mary settled in 1784.
Wikipedia says “a local schoolmaster” educated Chandler. He became a successful blacksmith and prominent enough in town to be elected to the Massachusetts Senate (1803-1805) and the United States House of Representatives (March 1805 to March 1809).
Declining renomination, he became Kennebec County Sheriff in 1808 and in 1812 a major general in the Massachusetts militia. His story will continue with the history of the War of 1812.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Websites, miscellaneous.
CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, artist Gilbert Stuart was misnamed Stuart Gilbert.
Fort Western in 1754.
For the next however many weeks, this series will discuss 19th-century wars that affected central Kennebec Valley residents. After the British gained legal control of the region by the 1763 Treat of Paris, the valley was mostly peaceful, but military actions elsewhere had local effects.
Your writer will start with the American Revolution (1775-1783), and go on to summarize some of the local connections with two more wars that finally ended quarrels over Britain’s interest in this side of the American continent, the War of 1812 (1812-1815) and the Aroostook War (1838-1839).
Next will come a very incomplete story of the all-encompassing Civil War (1861-1865). Many men and some women from the central Kennebec Valley were actively involved.
This part of the series will conclude with the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Though Kennebec Valley residents were aware of these geographically distant events, local effects were limited, with the important exception of families whose menfolk fought, and sometimes died, on the fields or seas of battle.
* * * * * *
The United States in the 19th century had two forms of military organization, the national army and the local militia units.
The U. S. Army, the oldest branch of the national military service, is a direct successor of the Continental Army, organized June 14, 1775. After the Revolution, mistrust of a “standing army” in the newly independent country led to temporary abandonment of a national force.
Soon, however, frontier wars made an organized armed force necessary. Wikipedia says Congress created the Legion of the United States in 1791 and in 1796 renamed it the United States Army. The United States has had a national military ever since, though a small one until the 20th century.
Wikipedia says local militias date from Sept. 16, 1565, when Spanish Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles organized the first unit in St. Augustine, Florida, leaving the men to guard supplies while he led his army to attack a French fort.
When English settlers arrived four decades later, they brought with them a tradition of organized militia units. Wikipedia says the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies (established in 1607 and 1620, respectively) started by enrolling every able-bodied man as a militia member.
“By the mid-1600s every town had at least one militia company (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of captain) and the militia companies of a county formed a regiment (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of major in the 1600s or a colonel in the 1700s),” Wikipedia summarizes.
After independence, colonies’ militia units became state militia units. Wikipedia says the federal government first began regulating them in 1792, and until the early 20th century relied on them “to supply the majority of its troops.” The militia became the National Guard in 1903.
Augusta historian Charles Nash included a chapter on the militia in his 1904 history. He described a typical local unit as enrolling able-bodied “citizens” (this writer is quite sure he meant male citizens) between 18 and 40 years old each spring.
“The organization of the militia consisted of companies of infantry in citizen’s dress (better known as ‘string-beaners’), light infantry in uniform, cavalry, artillery, and riflemen; these were organized into regiments, brigades, and divisions,” Nash wrote. Each infantry regiment normally had a company of cavalry and another of riflemen with it.
Uniformed infantry wore blue coats, artillery men “the revolutionary color [dark blue, according to Wikipedia] faced with red” and riflemen green, the better to hide in ambush in the woods. Infantry and rifle companies included fifers and drummers; the cavalry and artillery units had buglers.
Officers, Nash wrote, rode horseback. They wore the “wind-cutting” three-pointed, round-crowned black hat associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, “surmounted by lofty plumes,” and on their shoulders “glittering epaulettes.”
After organizing in May, militias drilled during the summer and in the fall held local musters that were the year’s main attraction for people of all classes, Nash said. Augusta’s muster ground for many years, well into the 1800s, was an area between Augusta and Hallowell named Hinkley’s Plains, after an early settler.
Nash described a typical muster, with demonstrations of military maneuvers, music and a final review before the mounted commander. Outside the muster area “tradesmen and peddlers and hucksters” assembled as for a fair; a great deal of liquor was consumed, inside and outside. In a footnote, Nash wrote that in 1844 the Maine Legislature banned musters because of the “gross intemperance practices.”
The 1817 muster at Hinkley’s Plains was special, Nash wrote, because Massachusetts Governor John Brooks came north to review the troops, only the second time a Massachusetts governor had visited the Kennebec Valley.
Governor Brooks had been a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary army and afterwards a major-general in the militia, and was known for his military appearance and skilled, graceful horsemanship. Local soldiers were eager to make their appearance before him, and, Nash wrote, people from 50 miles around made plans to attend.
Alas, early morning clouds and fog turned into a “cold and pitiless northeast rain storm.” The audience stayed home. The troops mustered anyway, with “drooping plumes, soiled uniforms and muddy boots and ruined gaiters.”
Brooks reviewed them from the back of “a fine dapple-gray clad in rich equestrian trappings.” The governor wore “a revolutionary three-cornered hat, with a large cockade on its left point, and a short black plume on its crown;…a blue military cloak, the cape of which was deeply bordered with red silk velvet, and its front and sides trimmed with gold lace; his breeches were buff and his high swarrow boots of shiny black polish, displayed silken tassels below the knees; a gold-hilted sword and gilded scabbard hung by his side.”
[“Swarrow,” or Suwarrow or Suarrow, boots are mentioned in the Askin Papers, documents relating to John Askin’s life in the northwestern United States, written between 1747 and 1820. Howard Franklin Shout, who wrote a thesis translating the papers into modern English for his Michigan State College Master of Arts degree in the 1920s, confessed that he was “not able to identify” the word.]As Brooks and his staff began the review, Nash wrote, the governor took off his hat, “and while the merciless rain poured upon his whitened locks which fell upon his shoulders, he rode slowly before the line looking upon every soldier in it.”
Smaller towns, too, had their local militias. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her history of Albion, mentioned an 1808 town meeting vote to buy 32 pounds of powder. Other area towns had organized militia units and were stocking up on powder around that time, she wrote, adding, “Troops practiced on the town commons and were quite well organized when the War of 1812 called them to active duty.”
Her research in town records found local expenditures for the town militia, and supplementary payments from the State of Maine, part of the time (depending on successive town treasurers’ degree of detail) from 1839 until the Civil War.
Palermo had two muster fields, Milton Dowe wrote in his 1954 history. One was at Longfellow Corner, “where the Second Baptist Church was built in 1827”; the other was on Marden Hill.
* * * * * *
Six of the 12 central Kennebec Valley towns covered in these articles had legal European settlers by the spring of 1775 (Vassalboro, including Sidney, and Winslow, including Waterville, were incorporated on April 26, 1771), and four more by the time the Revolution ended in 1783. The exceptions were the off-the-river towns of Albion and Windsor, where the first settlements date from the 1880s. Your writer thinks it highly probable, however, that trappers, hunters, fugitives, hermits and other solitary types had homes in the region before record-keeping started.
Fort Halifax.
According to local histories, Augusta and Winslow were occupied first. Augusta was the site of the Cushnoc trading post, which dated from the 1620s, and then of Fort Western, built in 1758. Fort Halifax, in Winslow, was built in 1754-55.
Europeans mostly moved from the coast up the Kennebec, settling the east shore at Vassalboro around 1760 and around 1763 the west shore that later separated from Vassalboro as Sidney. Winslow settlers had spilled across the river into what became Waterville before Fairfield was settled in 1771.
By April 1775 Fairfield had nine families, according to the writers of the bicentennial history. The writers surmised that it took months for news of Lexington and Concord to reach them, and that between their immediate needs and the protection of nearby Fort Halifax, they felt little personal concern.
Clinton’s and Benton’s early arrivals date from around 1775. By then people were moving inland; China’s first family arrived in 1773, Palermo’s around 1776 or 1777.
Kingsbury, considering the whole of Kennebec County, did not share the later Fairfield historians’ opinion about the lack of local reaction. He wrote that news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord led to “bands of scantly equipped men and boys…pushing their way through the forests” to the nearest place where they could enlist.
“Many farms were abandoned or left to the care of women and minors,” Kingsbury continued, and not all the minors were content to remain behind (as examples in a following article will show).
In Augusta (then Hallowell), he said, a group of patriots organized themselves in January 1775 (before Lexington and Concord). In following months they formed a pro-Revolutionary military company and a public safety committee whose responsibilities included corresponding with Revolutionary leaders around Boston.
Winslow, similarly, had a three-man committee of correspondence, created in 1776 to keep town officials in touch with other pro-independence groups, Kingsbury wrote.
The specific event during the Revolutionary War that directly involved the Kennebec Valley was the expeditionary force sent in September 1775 to capture Québec from the British. Led by Colonel Benedict Arnold, about 1,100 men left Newburyport, Massachusetts, by ship on Sept. 17, or Sept. 19 (or thereabouts; exact dates differ from one to another of the many accounts of the expedition). They began landing at Major Reuben Colburn’s shipyard in Gardinerston (now Pittston) a few days later.
Colburn, a supporter of the Revolution, had collected information and built bateaux, flat-bottomed boats the army needed to navigate the river. The boats were built of green wood and therefore heavy and leaky; food, gunpowder and soldiers’ feet were wet most of the time.
After several days of transferring supplies to the bateaux, the expedition moved upriver. Stops along the Arnold Trail to Québec, as it is named on the National Register of Historic Places, included Fort Western, in Augusta; Fort Halifax, in Winslow; and Fairfield, where the 1988 bicentennial history says an early settler named Jonathan Emery repaired some of the bateaux, and a memorial stone marks the route.
By 1775 Fort Halifax had been out of service since the peace of 1763. Much of it had been torn down, and the central building had become a tavern, according to the centennial history of Waterville. Two area residents had explored up the river to provide advance information; another went with the expedition as a guide.
Disease and accidents, and in at least one case deliberate murder, claimed soldiers’ lives as the expedition moved on. Ernest Marriner wrote that Dr. John McKechnie (1732-1782), who had surveyed Waterville in 1762 and moved there in 1771, treated sick and injured men. Others are said to have been buried in the Emery Hill Cemetery, in Fairfield.
The murder, Kingsbury wrote, occurred as a result of a quarrel between two soldiers during several days the army spent at Fort Western. The shooter was court-martialed and sentenced to hang, but Arnold stayed the execution and forwarded the case to General Washington. The victim was buried “near the Fort burying ground”; later, Kingsbury wrote, Willow Street covered his “unheeded grave.”
Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed. Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).
Websites, miscellaneous.