Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in Augusta – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

By 1820, James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta, the town was again thriving after the economic downturn caused by the War of 1812. The bridge across the Kennebec River had been rebuilt; a dam was proposed to promote water-powered industry (finally built in 1837); stagecoaches and steamboats provided connections to the rest of the state, country and world; population and wealth had increased; there was talk of moving the state capital from Portland (done in 1832).

In 1820, voters raised $1,200 for education (and $1,500 for supporting the poor and other expenses and $2,000 for roads), North said. After that, he seemed to lose intereste in local primary education. Nash, in his Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, continued the story, writing that school districts were “divided and subdivided” as Augusta grew, until there were 27.

After 1815, voters chose a single agent for each district, plus a five-man town school committee, Nash said. An 1833 state law allowed modifications (see below).

A second quasi-public secondary school, succeeding the o  ne that burned in 1807 (see last week’s story) was organized in 1835. On Feb. 19, 1835, the Maine legislature chartered the Augusta Classical School Association, with a seven-man board of directors.

North wrote that its founders’ goals were “promoting the cause of education in the higher branches, and establishing a school in Augusta to prepare young men for a collegiate course.” (The nearest high school at the time was Hallowell Academy, which had opened in 1795; see the Oct. 10 article in this subseries.)

School Association members sold shares to raise money, bought the “spacious” (North’s word) former grammar school lot at Bridge and State streets and oversaw construction of a 50-by-65-foot, two-story brick building at a cost of $7,000, furnishings included.

North described the interior: “two large school rooms, recitation rooms and a laboratory containing philosophical apparatus.” (“Philosophical apparatus” is the early term for equipment used in scientific studies.)

The school opened April 18, 1836, headed by Professor William H. Allen, from the Methodist seminary at Cazenovia, New York (later president of Girard College, in Philadelphia), assisted by his sister, Miss R. Clifford Allen and, according to Nash, by another man and woman. Tuition was $6 a term (neither Nash nor North said how many terms in a year), expected to cover expenses.

The school was not a success. North implied that Allen’s (undated) departure was one blow. Nash wrote, “after a few years of indifferent financial success, its worthy promoters suffered its doors to be finally closed.”

* * * * * *

Meanwhile, Nash wrote, the Maine legislature passed, on Feb. 27, 1833, an act specifically applicable to Augusta’s elementary and high-school students that, as he explained it, had two parts. First, it authorized any school district to elect a seven-man committee (the number was later reduced to three or five) that would have full authority over the district’s school(s); and second, it authorized districts to consolidate.

Supporters found the act hard to implement, Nash said – not enough people were ready for “the proposed innovation.” At last, in early 1842, school districts number 3 and number 9 united as the Village School District. From locations of school buildings Nash and North provided, this district covered most of present-day Augusta on the west side of the Kennebec.

The seven directors elected at an April 6, 1842, meeting found they had 974 students and two buildings, the “wooden, old-fashioned” Piper School, on Laurel Street, and an unnamed two-room brick building, at the intersection of Grove Street and Western Avenue.

The directors determined they needed six primary schools, one (Nash) or two (North) grammar school(s) and one high school. They built two new “frame houses” (Nash’s description), raising $850 from district taxes to buy lots and put up the buildings (according to North).

(As reported previously, after the Maine legislature ordered every town to raise school money, district taxes were no longer the only source of funding. Apparently they required legislative approval; in 1849, North said, the Village District requested and received legislative permission for a district tax, not to exceed 20 cents per resident, to support education.)

At the end of 1842, North wrote, the directors were pleased with the quality of education they’d provided. They’d spent $2,401.51 – $1,212 for teachers, the rest for acquiring and maintaining buildings and for firewood and other miscellaneous items. There had been 33 weeks of teaching in nine schools.

Not all district residents were as pleased. Some, North said, disagreed with the assignment of their children to a specific school; more were unhappy about the high school. The latter group included some whose children were deemed not qualified to attend, some who thought it too expensive and some who feared foreign languages were stealing money and attention from English.

North detailed several years of contentious meetings, with frequent changes of elected directors. At an April 19, 1843, meeting (the second that month), two motions to make students studying Latin or Greek pay tuition were defeated; but voters approved a motion to “discontinue the present system of high school instruction.”

Instead, they approved a proposal to have six primary schools and three grammar schools, boys’, girls’ and co-ed.

This system was not universally popular, either. Voters at an April 20, 1844, meeting re-elected five of the seven 1843 directors and replaced two (North did not say whether the two resigned or were rejected). They postponed indefinitely (in effect, voted down) a motion to divide the Village District into three districts, which North said would have been a retreat to the old system.

Dissension continued through 1845 and 1846. Meanwhile, North said, town meetings had increased funding for schools, from $1,600 in 1840 to $3,000 in 1846, making residents feel less oppressed by the district school tax and reviving the belief that education was essential to good government.

Consequently, the second of two March and April 1847 meetings approved a wordy resolution that called for “suitable schoolhouses…conveniently located” for the “small children”; at least two grammar schools; and a high school. North added that 1847 town meetings appropriated $4,000 for education.

Nash offered summary descriptions of new grammar schools built in the district in 1848, 1850, 1853 and 1855. The last four, two in 1850 and one each in 1853 and 1855, were brick.

North said the four two-story brick buildings cost a total of about $12,000 and were considered among the best in Maine “for interior arrangement and finish.” Writing in 1870, he regretted that the “exteriors were not made more attractive” and that the buildings were not made larger to accommodate more classes.

Nash listed another school, built in 1890, that became the Cushnoc Heights Grammar School. (An on-line source says the modern name of Cushnoc Heights is Sand Hill, the hill on the west side of the Kennebec just north of downtown Augusta.)

As of April 1892, Nash said the Village District student enrollment was 2,052, “about two thirds of the whole number in the city.” In 1892, Charles E. Nash was one of the three Village School District directors, and a man named Gustavus A. Robertson had been principal of the Village District schools since 1868.

* * * * * *

For a Village District high school, Nash and North said, the directors first rented the Classical School Association’s old building. In June, 1848, they bought it from the remaining shareholders, for $3,000. North called this purchase an important step in reducing opposition to the high school, as well as a good deal financially.

In 1869, Nash said, the former Classical Association’s high school building was “superseded by the present spacious edifice,” which was dedicated Aug. 26, 1870. The new building, at the intersection of Bridge and State streets, a couple blocks uphill from the Kennebec, was almost finished when North completed his history in 1870. He said it cost about $25,000, for which the District issued bonds.

North approved of the two-story brick cruciform building building’s “pleasing appearance.” Inside, he wrote, it was “conveniently arranged to accommodate two schools of two hundred students each in single seats.”

Each floor, he said, had five rooms: a 52-by-54-foot “schoolroom,” two 22-by-30-foot “recitation rooms” and two 15-foot-square “clothes rooms.” The ground-floor rooms had 14-foot ceilings, the second-floor rooms 16-foot ceilings.

The third floor “formed by the mansard roof” was to be used as “a hall for school exercises and exhibitions.”

The Village District high school closed in 1881, when Cony Free High School opened. The building continued in use for younger students, and in 1891 was named the William R. Smith School, honoring a just-retired “steadfast friend and able promoter of the public schools” who had been connected with the district since it was formed almost 50 years earlier.

Your writer found on line postcards showing Augusta’s William R. Smith Grammar School, one dated 1909. These postcards show a large three-story brick building on a stone foundation, with elaborate window trim, different on each level, and a mansard roof. (North had described the windows: “large, circular headed, giving abundance of light.”)

* * * * * *

Nash wrote that in 1882 – 49 years after the legislature authorized districts to consolidate – three on the east side of the Kennebec merged to become the Williams School District. The new district’s directors divided students into primary, intermediate and grammar-school levels.

As of 1892, there were 581 students, and the directors had just opened a new four-room school house, costing $13,000, on Wedge Hill, on Bangor Street. (Bangor Street runs north along the east side of the Kennebec from the Cony Street intersection, becoming Riverside Drive, in Vassalboro. (Rte. 201.)

Nash also wrote that in 1887, the City of Augusta abolished “all the suburban districts” and “adopted a town system for them.” (As reported previously, the Maine legislature abolished school districts state-wide seven years later.)

In 1892, he said, there were 17 “suburban schools,” with names instead of numbers. Your writer found on line two Kennebec Journal clippings about one of them, Hewins School (location unknown).

On Friday, March 23, 1917, the school presented an “entertainment and pie social,” with music and recitations, to raise money to pay for the “Grafonia” or “Grafonola” (an early Columbia phonograph).

Hewins School closed at the beginning of 1948 and its 11 students, seven of them in second grade or below, were bussed to Williams School.

Williams School is not on Nash’s 1892 list by that name. An on-line source says it closed in June 1980 after 89 years; the story is illustrated with a photo of fourth- and fifth-graders carrying desks to the Hussey School. (Augusta still has a Lillian Parks Hussey Elementary School, built in 1954 on Gedney Street, on the east side of the river a block east of Bangor Street.)

Augusta also had a Nash School, built in 1897 and named in honor of the Charles E. Nash whose chapters in Kingsbury’s history your writer has been citing. The former school building at the intersection of State and Capitol streets is part of Augusta’s Capitol Complex Historic District.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Traffic and construction updates in Augusta, Waterville

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Western Ave. Bridge, Augusta

The Maine Department of Transportation project to replace the bridge that carries Western Avenue (Route 202) over I-95 in Augusta is going to begin having significant traffic impacts later this month.

Beginning on Monday, October 28, the ramp that carries eastbound Western Avenue traffic to the interstate will be closed. Eastbound traffic will be able to use one of three detours to access I-95:

– Vehicles can continue eastbound down Western Avenue and reverse direction at Meadow Road/Fuller Road to access the interstate from the westbound side of Western Avenue.
– Vehicles can continue eastbound down Western Avenue and take a right on Senator Way followed by a left on Crossing Way (this goes past Target), and then access the interstate from the westbound side of Western Avenue. This option is the official truck detour.
– For southbound interstate access only, vehicles can take a right on Whitten Road before the interstate. There will be a new connection between Whitten Road and the southbound interstate ramp.

Beginning on Monday, November 18, the southbound interstate exit ramp at Exit 109B will also be closed. Southbound traffic can use Exit 109A to get off the interstate and onto Western Avenue.

Each of these ramp closures will last approximately 30 days. During this time, contractors will be constructing the temporary bridge that will carry Western Avenue over the interstate during the next phase of construction.

On-site construction for this project started in November 2023. The work has been happening primarily under the existing bridge and ramps with minimal traffic impacts.

The existing Western Avenue bridge is approximately 70 years old. MaineDOT is replacing the structure with a new bridge on a similar alignment. The new bridge will provide additional vertical clearance on the interstate. It will also include approximately 1,350 feet of new sidewalk along Western Avenue and Whitten Road to improve pedestrian access and safety.

The contractor for this project is Reed & Reed, Inc. of Woolwich. The contract amount is approximately $30 million.

Ticonic Bridge, Waterville-Winslow

Original plans, beginning December 16, the Ticonic Bridge across the Kennebec River, between Waterville and Winslow, will be closed to all traffic through June 20, 2025. However, because this falls during the holiday season, the Maine Department of Transportation and Cianbro Corp., the contractor, are in talks about delaying the closure until after the holidays. More details to come.

Around the Kennebec Valley: Augusta education – Part 1

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Cony Female Academy

by Mary Grow

The town – now city – of Augusta was created on Feb. 20, 1797, when the Massachusetts legislature, responding to a local petition, divided the town of Hallowell.

The downriver third remained Hallowell. The upriver two-thirds became Harrington, renamed Augusta on June 9, 1797.

Harrington lasted long enough for voters to hold their first town meeting on April 3, where they raised $400 for education (and $1,250 for highways and another $300 for all other responsibilities).

In that first year, Captain Charles Nash wrote in his chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, Augusta officials re-created the eight school districts they inherited from Hallowell. Reflecting the current population distribution, numbers 1 and 2 were on the east side of the Kennebec and the other six across the river.

The traditional three-man district school committees continued, and in addition, Nash said, members of a seven-man town committee were expected “to visit schools,” presumably as overseers.

“This action was twenty-seven years in advance of statute legislation, and nearly a quarter of a century before Maine became a state and required it by law,” Nash commented.

A ninth school district was created in 1803.

James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta that 1803 was also the year that an “association of citizens” banded together to start the first post-primary school in town, buying shares to fund a brick grammar school building in the northwest corner of the intersection of Bridge and State streets, on the west side of the Kennebec.

(Bridge Street goes up the hill from the west end of the Calumet Bridge and intersects State Street at a right angle several blocks north of the state capitol complex. State Street roughly parallels the river.)

The building was finished in 1804, North said, and the association hired a Mr. Cheney (not further identified) as “preceptor” for a year, at a salary of $450. Courses included what Nash labeled “dead languages” (Greek and Latin).

Students were shareholders’ children, or children to whose parents a shareholder had “let” a share. Each share admitted one student.

North wrote that the school “flourished” until the building burned on March 16, 1807.

(Disastrous fires were not uncommon; in the next few pages North mentioned the Feb. 11, 1804, burning of a large Augusta building in which an early newspaper, the Kennebec Gazette was printed; the Jan. 29, 1805 (Nash said 1804), burning of the building that housed Hallowell Academy; the Jan. 8, 1808, burning of two adjacent blacksmith shops on Water Street; and the March 16, 1808, burning of the jail [a fire set by an inmate].)

By 1810, North wrote, Augusta was thriving; population and wealth had increased, and $1,000 was raised for schools (also $1,500 for roads and another $1,500 for “Poor and other necessary charges”).

Two years later, due to the War of 1812 with Great Britain, the Kennebec Valley economy was in distress. North talked about prices rising and stores closing, but he said nothing about the effect on education or other tax-dependent activities.

* * * * * *

North’s next educational reference was to 1815, when Judge Daniel Cony (see box) started building what looked like a house – but, North said, people asked why he wanted another house there? – at the intersection of Bangor and Cony streets on the east side of the Kennebec.

Adding a tower to the structure led to surmise that it was intended as a meeting-house for worship – and why did the Judge want a meeting-house?

When “seats and desks began to go in,” people concluded the building was a school. They were right; Judge Cony announced it would house Cony Female Academy. On Christmas Day, 1815, the Judge gave the building and lot to five men he had chosen as trustees; they organized themselves as a board on Jan. 5, 1816, and opened the school that spring.

A picture of the building on line (at stcroixarchitecture.com) shows a three-story main block with a steeply pitched roof that provided space for a fourth floor. ­­­On each front corner was a two-story ell with third-story windows under its pitched roof.

The center of the front was a square tower topped with two levels of lattice-work under another steep roof two stories above the main roof. On the front of the base of the tower, a single-story entrance had another peaked roof, an arched door and two side windows.

The roofs were a medium blue, a contrast to the pale beige bricks. Medium-brown chimneys rose higher than the rooftops on the back of the main building and the side of each ell; the color matched the trim on the gables.

As Cony directed, his Academy offered free education to “worthy” orphans and other girls younger than 16. It also accepted tuition-paying students. North wrote that income soon covered expenses, and by 1820 Cony Female Academy “had a sum of money on hand in excess of expenses.”

Meanwhile, on Feb. 10, 1818, the Massachusetts legislature approved a charter for the Academy. In June of that year, North wrote, Cony gave the trustees a bell for the building; “maps and charts” for classes; and 10 shares in the Augusta Bank. He directed them to use five-sixths of the income from the bank shares to educate orphans and the remainder to buy prizes – medals or books – for “meritorious pupils.”

Kingbury wrote that 50 girls were Academy students in 1825. Their tuition was $20 a year; board was $1.25 a week.

In February 1827, North said, the by-then-Maine legislature gave the Academy a half township farther north in Maine (after an 1826 charter amendment gave the legislature a role in adding to or limiting the trustees’ powers). In February 1832 the trustees sold the land for $6,000.

In 1827, a Bostonian named Benjamin Bussey donated land in Sidney, which the trustees sold for $500. That year, too, the trustees oversaw construction of a brick dormitory at the intersection of Bangor and Myrtle streets, two blocks north of the main building, which was still standing in 1870.

Another on-line site quoted an 1828 advertisement that listed courses offered: “orthography, reading and writing, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric and composition, geography, History and Chronology, Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, use of the globes, Drawing Maps, and also Drawing, penciling, and painting, and a variety of needlework.”

The school’s library, which in 1829 had 1,200 volumes, was “considered by some historians to be the best in the area at the time,” the stcroixarchitecture.com writer said.

The Academy’s second classroom building, after the school outgrew the original one, was the nearby former Bethlehem church at the intersection of Cony and Stone streets (built in the summer of 1827). The Academy trustees voted to buy it in November 1844 for $765; it, too was still standing in 1870. (They sold the original Academy building for $500, to Rev. John H. Ingraham, who made it into a house.)

North listed the Academy’s preceptresses and preceptors (teachers), usually one but occasionally two, over the years, starting with Hannah Aldrich in 1816 and ending with Mrs. Arthur Berry in 1857, the last year of operation. A minority were men.

Daniel Cony

(See also the Feb. 23, 2023, issue of The Town Line.)

Daniel Cony

Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan. 21, 1842) was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, south of Boston. He studied medicine in Marlboro, west of Boston, under Dr. Samuel Curtis.

When the British marched from Boston to Lexington on April 19, 1775, Cony was practicing medicine in Tewksbury, north of Boston (Find a Grave says Shutesbury, half-way across the state and therefore likely an error), and was a lieutenant in the local company of Minutemen. North reported that he was awakened at 2 a.m. by a knock on his door and the shouted message “Ameri­can blood has been spilled and the country must rally.”

Cony and the rest of the company were on the way to Cambridge by sunrise; North did not say what they did there.

Later in the war, Cony served as adjutant in an infantry regiment (the 6th New Hampshire, according to Find a Grave) under General Horatio Gates, at Saratoga, New York, where, North wrote, he once led soldiers through an area commanded by a British battery to assist another company. He was present when British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army to Gates on Oct. 17, 1777.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 14, 1776, Cony had married Dr. Curtis’s niece, Susanna Curtis (May 4, 1752 – Oct. 25, 1733), in Sharon, Massachusetts. He left the army and in 1778 he and Susanna and their first daughter, Nancy (born in 1777), came to Hallowell, where his father, Deacon Samuel Cony, had moved the previous year and where Nancy died the year they arrived.

The couple had four more daughters (no sons): Susan (1781 -1851), Sarah (1784 – 1867), Paulina (1787 -1857) and Abigail (1791 -1875). All married local men.

Historians generally agree that Judge Cony created the Academy in appreciation of his own daughters and, since by 1816 all four were past school age, as a charitable exercise.

The family lived on the east side of the Kennebec. North said their second house, downhill from “the hospital” (the insane asylum) was still standing in 1870. Their third one, built around 1797 on Cony Street, burned in 1834 and was succeeded by “the present brick edifice on the same lot,” where Cony lived the rest of his life.

Cony practiced medicine in the area, was a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and corresponded with other doctors, North said. In 1825-26, he was one of the founders of Augusta’s Unitarian Church.

He served as “representative, senator, and counsellor [member of the executive council]” in the Massachusetts legislature. Before 1820, he held judgeships in Kennebec County, Massachusetts. He was one of Augusta’s three delegates to the October 1819 Maine constitutional convention, and after statehood, was a Maine Judge of Probate until 1823, when he “resigned by reason of age.”

North wrote that until 1806, Cony frequently moderated Hallowell and Augusta town meetings. In 1830, after some years of not even attending them, he showed up – and was immediately and unanimously elected moderator. The meeting record showed a vote of thanks for “the able, impartial, and dignified manner in which he discharged the arduous duties of this day as moderator” at the age of 77 years and seven months.

In addition to creating Cony Female Academy, North wrote that Cony was “instrumental” in getting legislative charters for Hallowell Academy in 1791 and Bowdoin College in 1794. He was a trustee of Hallowell Academy and a Bowdoin overseer. He supported public education “by the exercise of a constant and healthful influence in its favor.”

Find a Grave displays Cony’s short death notice in the Augusta Age, published the day after his death. It mentions his Revolutionary service and goes on to describe him as a man who had “discharged various and important civil trusts, and was long and honorably connected with the settlement and growth of this section of the State.”

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

CAMPAIGN 2024: Candidates address issues concerning Maine voters (Part 1)

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PHOTOS: Winslow has strong showing at USATF track and field trials

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Winslow’s Natalie Cassiana, competing at the USATF Youth Track and Field championships, held at Cony High School, in Augusta, on August 10.. (photo by Mark Huard, Central Maine Photography)

by Mark Huard

The USATF Youth Track and Field Championships took place at Cony High School on Saturday August 10. Over 1,000 youth track & competitors from all around the state of Maine were in attendance for a great day!

Eli Nadeau (photo by Mark Huard, Central Maine Photography)

Dominic Akoa (photo by Mark Huard, Central Maine Photography)

Charlie Young (photo by Mark Huard, Central Maine Photography)

EVENTS: A Capital Read gets underway in Augusta

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photo: Friends of Lithgow Public Library

The Friends of Lithgow Library are happy to announce that our 2024 A Capital Read selection is Tess Gerritsen’s The Spy Coast. A retired CIA operative in small-town Maine tackles the ghosts of her past in this fresh take on the spy thriller in Gerritsen’s latest book.

What is A Capital Read? It is a “one book” community read project spearheaded by Lithgow Library, in Augusta, and sponsored by the Friends of Lithgow Library. How do you participate in A Capital Read?

– Read the book! The library has a full stock of books which can be borrowed, including copies in large print.
– Attend free programs scheduled in September that explore themes of the book.
– Attend An Evening with Tess Gerritsen on September 25. Join for cocktail hour in the Danforth Art Gallery at UMA’s Jewett Hall, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. There will also be book sales and signing during that time. Immediately following, Tess will give a talk in the Jewett Hall Auditorium, across the hall. The cost is free, but please RSVP by September 16.

For more details and to register for the talk, visit our calendar at www.lithgowlibrary.org , visit Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LithgowPublicLibrary/ or call the library at 207-626-2415.

Lithgow Library is located at 45 Winthrop Street in Augusta. For more information, please call the library at (207) 626-2415 or visit our website at www.lithgowlibrary.org.

Law enforcement memorial service held in Augusta

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Salute by Maine State Troopers. (photo by Mark Huard)

by Mark Huard

Maine’s law enforcement members who lost their lives in the line of duty were honored on Tuesday, May 14.

The annual observance at the Maine Law Enforcement Officers Memorial was held in Augusta at the granite memorial near the State Capitol, and dedicated to the fallen officers that were killed in the line of duty.

The memorial has the names of 88 law enforcement officers, some dating back to the 1800s. Officers from across the state, families of the fallen, and other special speakers including Governor Janet Mills.

“We grieve the loss of friends, family, and neighbors taken from us through this violence. May we also pause in solemn gratitude that we need not add another name for this memorial today,” said Mills during her address. “As district attorney, as a private attorney, as your attorney general, and now as your governor, please know that I see the unexpected risks that each of you take when you report to duty every day. I see the sacrifice of your loved ones, waiting to know if you will come home safely. And I see the spirit of our fallen officers embodied in your commitment to serve our community and to keep this state the safest place in the nation to live, work, and raise a family.”

Despite all the differences fallen officers hold in their stories, Mills united them under one principle: “A principle that governed how they upheld the law, a promise to practice integrity, fairness, respect, and compassion in the 1,000 daily acts they performed on behalf of the Maine people. As they patrolled our roads, guarded our cities and towns, our woods, lakes, bays, and skies, always ready for that one urgent call that may mean the difference between life and death.”

Maine State Troopers honor their fallen comrades. (photo by Mark Huard)

SNHU announces winter 2024 honors

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Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), in Manchester, New Hampshire,  announces the following students being named to the Winter 2024 President’s List.
Justin Drescher, of Augusta,  Ivette Hernandez Cortez, of Augusta, Grant Brown, of Augusta,  Matthew Bandyk, of Jefferson, Jennifer Anastasio, of Jefferson, Talon Mosher, of Winslow,  Quincy Giustra, of Winslow,  Candice Eaton, of Waterville, Sierra Winson, of Winslow, Andre Coachman, of Waterville, Carrielee Harvey, of Waterville, Heather Hall, of Canaan, Stormy Wentworth, of Fairfield, Misty Ray, of Montville, Zachary Eggen, of Liberty, Christopher Beaman, of Madison, Emily Hernandez, of Embden, Blake Laweryson, of North Anson, and Van Boardman, of Oakland.
The following students were named to the Winter 2024 dean’s list:
Brandon Stinson, of Augusta, Nicholas Stutler, of Sidney, Jaimie Thomas, of Sidney, Grace Marshall, of Waterville, and Ashley Parks, of Anson.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: City of Augusta

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Old Fort Western

by Mary Grow

The City of Augusta began its legal existence as part of Hallowell, and has been named Augusta since June 9, 1797. It became the state capital in 1827, and transitioned from a town to a city in 1849. It is the only municipality in this part of the Kennebec River Valley that is still on both sides of the river.

As reported last week, the first permanent settlement inside Augusta’s present-day boundaries was the 1628 Cushnoc trading post. “Cushnoc,” (also spelled Coussinoc, Cusinok, Koussinoc, Koussinok) is a Native American word for “head of tide.”

In 1754, the Kennebec Proprietors built Fort Western, close to the trading post site on the highland on the east shore of the river.

There were two forts downriver: in Richmond, Fort Richmond, built in 1720 and abandoned in 1755, after the upriver forts were ready; and in Dresden, Fort Frankfort, built in 1752 and soon renamed Fort Shirley. The new name honored William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts from August 1741 to September 1749 and again from August 1753 through September 1756. Fort Shirley was garrisoned until 1759.

Upriver, in present-day Winslow, was Fort Halifax (1754-1766), built by the Massachusetts government at Ticonic (Taconett) falls. James North, in his history of Augusta, quoted Shirley’s April 16, 1754, letter to the Plymouth (aka Kennebec) Proprietors proposing the two forts.

The governor explained that the upriver fort would better protect British settlers from invasion by the French, settled in the St. Lawrence River valley and interested in the Kennebec as a route to Québec, and their Native American allies. The disadvantage was that above Cushnoc, the Kennebec wasn’t deep enough for sloops to bring in supplies.

Shirley said Massachusetts would provide the upriver fort, if the Proprietors would build at Cushnoc a “strong defensible magazine,” consisting of a fenced central building, soldiers’ quarters and two blockhouses. The governor promised – and provided – soldiers to protect the men building the fort.

Maine An Encyclopedia, found on line, says the fort was named in honor of a friend of Shirley’s named Thomas Western, of Sussex, England.

This website says supplies were shipped from Boston to Fort Western as often as four times a year. They were unloaded and “taken by flat-bottomed boat, against a strong river current, to Fort Halifax.”

The two forts were also connected by a road passable for wheeled vehicles that Shirley ordered built along the east bank of the Kennebec. North called it “probably the first military road of any considerable length constructed in Maine.” It was also the first iteration of what is now Route 201.

In the winter, North said, the road couldn’t be used because deep snow filled ravines. At least one winter, soldiers hauled sled-loads of supplies to Halifax on the frozen river.

The British recapture of Louisburg in 1758 and capture of Québec in 1759 led to expulsion of the French from North America, clearing the way for British settlement.

Or, as Captain Charles Nash wrote in his first Augusta chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, “Only when the gates of Québec opened to the army of the immortal Wolfe did the valley of the Kennebec become disenthralled from the fatal influences that had for a century delayed its development.”

State House

(British General James Wolfe was only figuratively immortal; readers may remember that he died during the battle for Québec, at the age of 32. The French leader, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, Marquis de Montcalm de Sainte-Veran, was severely wounded and died the next day, aged 47.)

In 1760, the Massachusetts legislature incorporated Lincoln County, including most of the Kennebec River valley. In 1761, the Plymouth Company commissioned the Winslow survey on both sides of the Kennebec, mentioned last week.

Winslow’s lots North described as in three tiers. Each lot was a mile deep; those on the river were 50 rods (825 feet) wide with an area of 100 acres; the second tier were 150 rods (2,475 feet) wide and 300 acres; and the third tier were 75 rods (1,237.5 feet) wide and 150 acres. Over half were for settlers, the rest reserved for Proprietors.

In 1762, North wrote, settlers began getting grants around the former fort. By 1764, he found, 37 families owned and occupied lots; 10 more were living on land that was granted to them later. He estimated the population at about 100 people.

Among these settlers was Captain James Howard, Fort Western’s commander. He claimed lots for himself and two sons, and he and his family lived and ran a store in the fort’s main building. The other military structures were torn down or allowed to deteriorate.

On the west side of the river, North wrote that in March 1764, Proprietors’ lots were granted, including to a builder named Gershom Flagg the one “upon which the central part of the city of Augusta is now built, from Winthrop to Bridge streets.”

Settlers were required to build a house, clear at least five acres for farming and live seven or eight years (sources differ) on their lots “in person or by substitute.”

With these conditions, North wrote, by April 26, 1771, four towns were populous enough to be incorporated: Hallowell, Vassalboro, Winslow and Winthrop.

* * * * * *

Post Office

The Hallowell of 1771 included all of present-day Hallowell, Augusta and Chelsea and most of Farmingdale and Manchester. Nash said it covered 65,715 acres (or 102.7 square miles) of mostly wilderness; North called it about 90 square miles (which equals 57,600 acres).

It was named after a Proprietor, Boston merchant Benjamin Hallowell. He owned 3,200 acres on the west side of the Kennebec, about three miles south of Fort Western; North said he was “extensively engaged in ship-building.”

By the mid-1770s, Nash wrote, settlers on the west bank of the Kennebec outnumbered those on the east, because of the better soil and more abundant water-power. Discussion of a building for town meetings began in 1777; when a decision was reached in 1781, the meeting house was on the west side of the river, near the foot of present-day Winthrop Street.

On the west side, mills at the mouths of brooks entering the Kennebec created two small population centers, a northern one called the Fort, nearly opposite Fort Western at Bond (or Bond’s) Brook, and another about two miles south called the Hook.

Nash said the Hook was so called because it was at the outlet of Kedumcook (now Vaughan) Brook, in Hallowell. North quoted a 1767 deposition by Colonel William Lithgow saying the British called the area Bombohook, but the Natives called it Kee-dum-cook, referring to the gravel shoals in the Kennebec River at that point.

By the 1790s, Nash wrote, residents of the Hook and the Fort began to disagree about town business. The result of one dispute, over how money raised to pay ministers should be spent, was the June 1794 division of Hallowell into three parishes, South, Middle and North.

In 1791, Hallowell Academy became “the first incorporated institution of learning in the district of Maine.” It was at the Hook. Nash wrote that at the March 16, 1795, town meeting in the meeting house, “the Hook party brilliantly carried an adjournment to the new academy building.”

This meeting Nash called a contest between north and south. North said the Hook people wanted five selectmen, instead of three, and the two communities disagreed over who was qualified to vote. The Fort won on both issues.

Town of Harrington

There is still a Harrington, Maine, in Washington County. It was incorporated June 17, 1797, according to an online source. Harrington’s website says it has a year-round population of 1,004 and is the home town of the Worcester Wreath Company, founder of the nonprofit Wreaths Across America program that puts wreaths on veterans’ graves every December.

By this time, Nash said, the Hook had the Academy, and in 1796 the South Church was built there. The Fort had the “meeting house, court house, jail and post office.” Each settlement had its own newspaper, whose writers “exchanged many a witty and telling repartee.”

The final straw came in 1796, and involved the river.

Until then, public transportation across it was by Pollard’s ferry, which ran from the east shore below former Fort Western to the bottom of Winthrop Street. Many people wanted a bridge; they realized it would be a major expense, even for the entire town; but Fort and Hook residents each wanted it in their village.

In early 1796, the Fort people asked the Massachusetts legislature to approve a bridge in their area. The Hook residents opposed the request.

But, Nash wrote, both Hallowell representatives in the Massachusetts legislature were from the Fort, and on Feb. 8, 1796, the legislature incorporated the Proprietors of the Kennebec Bridge. The act specified that the bridge’s west end be between Pollard’s ferry and Bond Brook.

Nash said Hook residents were depressed and disappointed. The two sides started opposing each other’s candidates for local office and expenditure requests; relations became so bad that separation seemed the only option.

People from the Fort favored division; people from the Hook were “therefore” opposed, Nash wrote. Nonetheless, when the Fort faction presented a petition to the Massachusetts legislature, the Hallowell representative, who was from the Hook, did not fight it.

* * * * * *

On Feb. 26, 1797, the Massachusetts legislature incorporated Hallowell’s middle and north parishes as the town of Harrington. Nash and North wrote that Harrington took almost two-thirds of Hallowell’s territory, which would have been between 60 and 68 square miles (see the differing figures for Hallowell above), and about half its population and property valuation.

(Wikipedia gives Augusta’s current area as 58.04 square miles, citing the United States Census Bureau. In May 1798, Harrington’s population was 1,140. In 2022, Augusta’s was 19,066.)

The name, Nash said, honored Lord Harrington, “a favorite courtier and honored minister of [King] George the Second.” Around 1730, an earlier royal commissioner had given the name to “ancient Pemaquid” (now Bristol). North said resident and legislative representative Amos Stoddard resurrected it in 1797; neither historian explained why.

Harrington voters held their organizational meeting April 3, 1797, electing officials and appropriating funds for roads, schools, support of the poor and other essentials. However, Nash wrote, the town’s name was “exceedingly unacceptable to the people,” who directed the selectmen to get it changed forthwith.

The selectmen accordingly petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to change Harrington to Augusta, and on June 9, 1797, their petition was granted. Nash said official documents give no reason for the anti-Harrington movement or the substitution of Augusta, but he offered his surmises.

In the 1790s, he said, Cushnoc was a place to catch migratory fish, including blackback herring and alewives, collectively known as river herring. Hook residents easily turned Harrington into Herring Town, leading upriver people to want a name “less susceptible to profane travesty.”

Augusta, he said, had (like Harrington) been used earlier, in 1716, for part of what is now Phippsburg. He called it “more than probable” that memory of that settlement suggested the “half romantic name…which the satirical neighboring humorists could not successfully ridicule.”

The bridge that apparently triggered the creation of Harrington/Augusta opened in November 1797.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Tristan Morton’s essay entry selected for second place in the nation

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Tristan Morton

Tristan Morton, 11, a student at St. Michael School, in Augusta, and Star Scout at Augusta Troop #603, was notified that his entry for the essay contest hosted by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) was selected for second place among sixth grade entries nationally. Tristan’s journey began with an essay on John Phillip Sousa’s Star Spangled Banner from the perspective of a reporter in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for its first public presentation.

Tristan has been amazed by the reception his essay received, as he was first selected to represent St. Michael School’s sixth grade. Reading the essay for the local post of the DAR, he was selected to represent the post at the State of Maine level. Next, he was chosen as Maine’s sixth grade DAR Essay Representative. Tristan’s work competed for the New England & New York region and after selection moved into the competition at the National level for the sixth grade.

Tristan’s parents, Marleen Lajoie COL. (ret.) USARNG & Jeffrey Morton COL. (ret.) USAR are proud of his efforts and the message of respect and honor his essay presents. His description of a 19th century patriotic setting, and the excited reception of this music by the crowd captured both the excitement and patriotic zeal at that 19th century event.

Tristan’s family is coordinating a visit to the National DAR Conference, in Washington, DC, for Tristan to receive his recognition and thank the organization. Tristan’s messages of respect for the artist and those who sacrificed to sustain our great country echo key elements of his school, Scouting America, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.