by Mary Grow

Sylvester Judd

Another local writer mentioned in Thomas Addison’s chapter on literary people in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history was Rev. Sylvester Judd, who was born in Westhampton, Massachusetts, and grew up in adjoining Northampton.

James North, in his history of Augusta, wrote that Judd was descended from Deacon Thomas Judd, who came from England to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1630s. Judd the author was born July 23, 1813, grandson of the first Sylvester in the family and second of eight children of the second Sylvester and Apphia (Hall) Judge.

His education is summarized in an on-line Unitarian-Universalist source, on-line Harvard Square Library and Louis Hatch’s history of Maine.

Judd worked odd jobs to earn money to attend Hopkins Academy, in Hadley, Massachusetts (founded in 1664). After a year there, he entered Yale, graduating in 1836.

He spent a year teaching “to pay off his debt” at a private school, in Templeton, Massachusetts, where he discovered Unitarianism and abandoned his family’s Congregationalism. From 1837 to 1840, he attended Harvard Divinity School.

Meanwhile, in April, 1825, some prominent Augusta men, including attorney Reuel Williams, organized a Unitarian society that became Christ Church.

Ministers came and went, North wrote, and one who filled in was Rev. Sylvester Judd, newly graduated and looking for a church. He was invited to apply for a full-time position, accepted and was ordained Oct. 1, 1840.

North praised Judd highly, calling him “young and ardent,” “beloved,” a man who “possessed originality, fullness and depth of thought; was enamored of the true and beautiful, and aimed at a high standard of elevation and purity.”

Harvard Square Library says that his liberal preaching on political issues “began to alienate some of his parishioners and others.” For example, his pacifism led him to call the American Revolution “a moral evil. This resulted in his being dismissed as chaplain to the state legislature.”

On Aug. 31, 1841, Judd married Reuel Williams’ daughter, Jane Elizabeth (born Dec. 1, 1819). The couple had three daughters.

North said the oldest was Jane Elizabeth, born Sept. 26, 1844; married Henry T. Hall, of Boston, on Sept. 25, 1867; and died Dec. 5, 1868. Frances Hall was born June 28, 1847; married Rev. Seth Curtis Beach in Boston on Nov. 17, 1869; and in 1870 was living in Minnesota. Apphia Williams was born March 16, 1853.

Judd was scheduled to speak in Boston in January 1853, North wrote, and after “severe mental labor” preparing his talk, had gone to bed Monday evening, Jan. 3, before taking the early morning train to Boston. Overnight, he was “attacked by a fatal disease” (unnamed); he died Jan. 26.

Addison called Judd “an author of national reputation” and “the master of an elegant and forceful literary style.” In addition to miscellaneous articles, several volumes of sermons and a history of Hadley, Massachusetts, and neighboring towns, he wrote three fiction works: “Margaret” (1845); “Philo, an Evangeliad” (1850); and “Richard Edney” (also 1850).

The first and last are novels. Harvard Square Library calls Philo “a long dramatic poem”; it is mostly in blank verse, rather than rhymed. New editions of all three books are listed on line.

On-line descriptions of Margaret give the full title as Margaret: A Tale of the Real and the Ideal, Blight and Bloom; Including Sketches of a Place Not Before Described, Called Mons Christi. Harvard Square Library considers it Judd’s “best work” and describes it as “perhaps the only Transcendental novel”.

(The Transcendental movement was a New England based philosophical world-view whose tenets included belief in the essential unity of all creation, humanity’s innate goodness and finding each individual’s truth through insight and intuition rather than science or logic. Essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882] is called the founder of Transcendentalism.)

Wikipedia says poet James Russell Lowell called Margaret “the most emphatically American book ever written.” An on-line book-seller’s page calls it “a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance”; and “[p]art eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history.”

(Bildungsroman is defined on line as a novel about a person’s “formative years or spiritual education.” The Harry Potter books are “in the literary tradition of a bildungsroman.”)

Citing an introduction by Gavin Jones to a 21st-century edition, the reviewer adds that two unusual features of Margaret are “creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power” and “its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form.”

A reader reacted on-line with equal enthusiasm, urging everyone to read Margaret. Calling it a great book, this person praised Judd’s writing style and his wide range of knowledge, from botany to literature to family and social life in a rural village.

Another reader who commented on line liked parts of the book, especially Margaret’s childhood in the village. Overall, though, she or he found it too preachy and said Judd was terrible at plotting, relying on coincidences and introducing and discarding characters randomly.

The novel influenced other 19th-century writers, British and American, despite, the book-seller reviewer says, being “controversial” for including alcoholism and capital punishment. Plot summaries found elsewhere explain both: Margaret is born in a very poor rural village where everyone drinks, and when she grows up her brother is executed for accidentally causing another man’s death.

The night after the execution, another brother starts a fire that a disgruntled character spreads. The village is destroyed. Margaret goes to Boston, where she finds a rich grandfather who helps her get the education she wants.

Margaret comes back to her village, marries a Mr. Evelyn and with him builds what the more critical on-line reviewer found an improbable Paradise, where people of different faiths – all varieties of Christians, Muslims, Jews – live together in sobriety and happiness.

Your writer offers a sample from the first chapter of the first section. The book begins:

We behold a child eight or ten months old; it has brown, curly hair, dark eyes, fair conditioned features, a health-glowing cheek, and well-shaped limbs. Who is it? Whose is it? what is it? where is it? It is in the centre of fantastic light, and only a dimly-revealed form appears. It may be Queen Victoria’s or Sally Twig’s. It is God’s own child, as all children are.

Then the sun comes out, the sky is blue and the wind blows, and Judd comments that sun, sky and wind are “common to Arctic and Antarctic regions, and belong to each of the three hundred and sixty terrestrial divisions.”

After two more pages, including a paragraph in which people react to the claim that the child is in pain in a dozen languages, including French, German, Italian, Latin, Arabic and Irish and Scottish dialects, Judd reveals that the child is Margaret, about whom he will tell more, after skipping “seven or eight years.”

Chapter Two is titled Work and Beauty. – An Impression of the Real. The first sentence reads:

The child Margaret sits in the door of her house, on a low stool, in our vernacular, ‘quilling,’ for her mother, who, in a room near by, is mounted in a loom, weaving and smoking, the fumes of her pipe mingling with the whizz of the shuttle, the jarring of the lathe, and the clattering of treadles.

A grey squirrel sits on Margaret’s shoulder watching her work.

* * * * * *

Philo begins with Philo standing in a village street explaining to his friend Charles that he is waiting for “a stranger…from the moon or otherwheres.”

Charles thinks Philo is crazy, and since he’s running an errand for his wife (“the mystery of merchants’ packages / She longs to handle.”), he cannot stay.

The stranger turns out to be the Angel Gabriel, who leads Philo to other places and times.

An early scene is set in a valley of “Luxuriant fields and sunny streams,” with flowers, bird songs and fragrant air, so that Philo asks, “Are we in heaven?”

By the stream there is a naked man whose back is “waled and bloody.” As Philo and Gabriel approach, they hear him wishing he were dead in the ocean to which the stream flows, rather than a slave in Carolina.

Have I not feelings, will, intelligence,
And sense of manhood, yearnings for the highest?
I cannot live; with death I sooner join
Issue than life. – Who’s near?

The man, Pomp, tells Gabriel and Philo about learning to read by stealing his young mistress’s books; learning that she, too, hates slavery; and escaping with her help.

After four days of freedom, during which
One hour enlargement grasped, one hour indulged
My birthright’s wild extravagance; the next
Reversed the whole, and sent me back a slave.

Now, Pomp says,

I cannot bide my time; I have no time, —
It is my master’s; mine, eternity
Shall be. The dogs are near, — delay me not.

And he jumps into the river. Gabriel then records the “bubble” that rises from the water and turns into a flaming wheel, then into a meteor that “shoots athwart the land” and bursts to create a bonfire that consumes slavery, so that

See how the riven races close as brothers;
Hear how a continental joy explodes,
And rolls a-thundering along the earth!
To which Philo replies:

Into the future thou hast borne me far;
Return we to our point, in place and time,
And with these visions let my actions rhyme.

* * * * * *

Wikipedia gives the full title of Judd’s second prose novel as Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family: A Rus-Urban Tale Simple and Popular, Yet Cultured and Noble of Morals, Sentiments, and Life Practically Treated and Pleasantly Illustrated, Containing Also Hints on Being Good and Doing Good. (Other sources spell “Rus-Urban” as “Rusurban.” Your writer guesses the word is Judd’s combination of “rustic” and “urban.”)

The accompanying description says the novel “tells the story of Richard Edney and his interactions with the Governor’s family, providing a perspective on morality and life. It also contains helpful hints on being a good person and doing good deeds.”

The novel is set in mid-19th-century Maine. It begins with Richard – no further identified at first – walking through a major snowstorm, burdened by a heavy pack, but nonetheless recognizing the snow as God-sent and pausing to help a woman who falls down. Here is the first paragraph, copied from a Kindle edition on-line:

It began to snow. What the almanac directed its readers to look out for about this time – what his mother told Richard of, as she tied the muffler on his neck in the morning – what the men in the bar-rooms, where he stopped to warm himself, seemed to be rubbing out of their hands into the fire – what the cattle, crouching on the windward side of barnyards, rapped to each other with their slim, white horns – what sleigh-bells, rapidly passing and repassing, jingled to the air – what the old snow, that lay crisp and hard on the ground, and the hushed atmosphere, seemed to be expecting – what a ‘snow-bank,’ a dense, bluish cloud in the south, gradually creeping along the horizon, and looming mid heavens, unequivocally presaged – a snow-storm, came good at last.

In following pages, Richard reaches his destination, his sister and brother-in-law’s city home; he hopes to find a job, preferably in a mill. The second chapter introduces the governor and his family with whom Richard will be connected.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

by Mary Grow

This week’s article is about two more Augusta-area writers whose careers began in the 19th century. In order of birth, they are Edward Stanwood (born in Augusta, spent most of his career in the Boston area) and Laura E. Richards (born in the Boston area, spent most of her career in Gardiner, two towns south of Augusta).

* ** ** *

Edward Stanwood was born in Augusta on Sept. 16, 1841, the third of Daniel Caldwell and Mary Augusta Webster Stanwood’s 11 children. He graduated from Bowdoin in the Class of 1861 and made a career as a historian and newspaperman.

Find a Grave and other on-line sites summarize parts of his career. More details are given in a 1923 article in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, written by his son-in-law, Charles Knowles Bolton (see below).

Stanwood’s professional career began in Augusta, reporting from 1858 to 1867 for several Maine newspapers, including the Kennebec Journal (founded in 1825).

Edward Stanwood

In the summer of 1867 Stanfield took a position with the Boston Daily Advertiser. From then on his career was based in Massa­chusetts. After 1884, the family spent summers on Squirrel Island, part of Southport, Maine.

In 1883, Stanwood left the Advertiser to become became editor of The Youth’s Companion, a job he held until 1911. This children’s magazine was founded in Boston in 1827, by Perry Mason & Company, and continued until it merged with American Boy in 1929.

In addition to editing, Stanwood wrote non-fiction works, mostly historical and political ­ – a history of the U. S. presidency, a history of U. S. tariff policy, a biography of James G. Blaine (to whom he was related, and with whom he frequently interacted) and many magazine articles.

Stanwood married Eliza Maxwell Topliff (born in Boston Oct. 10, 1839), on Nov. 16, 1870, in Boston. The couple had two children, Ethel (March 2, 1873 – Jan. 9, 1954), and Edward, Jr. (June 24, 1876 – May 16, 1939).

The Brookline, Massachusetts, Historical Society website says the house that was built for Edward Stanwood at 76 High Street was an example of “English Victorian Queen Anne style.”

The article continues, “Its gargoyles embarrassed Stanwood, publisher of the extremely influential The Youth’s Companion, who became known as the man with ‘the house of sunflowers and devils.'”

Eliza Stanwood died Sept. 24, 1917, on Squirrel Island. Edward died Oct. 11, 1923, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both are buried in Augusta’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Their daughter Ethel graduated from Wellesley College, Class of 1894, and married Charles Knowles Bolton on June 23, 1897, in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was one of the first women to vote in Shirley, Massachusetts, after the 14th Amendment took effect on Aug. 26, 1920.

Ethel and her husband, who was a librarian, both wrote about local history and local families. One of Ethel’s works named on line is Clement Topliff and His Descendants in Boston, a history of her mother’s family (published in 1906).

An on-line genealogy says Clement Topliff might have been born Nov. 17, 1603 (the date is labeled “uncertain”), in England; he died Dec. 24, 1672, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His son Samuel (born in 1646) fathered Ebenezer (1689), who fathered another Ebenezer (1719), who fathered another Samuel (1758), who fathered Eliza’s father, Samuel, Jr. (1789-1864).

Ethel died and is buried in Shirley.

Ethel’s brother, Edward, Jr., graduated from Bowdoin College and from Harvard Law School. According to the Brookline Historical Society, he married Marion Evans in Chicago, Illinois, on June 15, 1907, and “worked in Boston.”

Find a Grave’s website shows a photo of a June 15, 1907, marriage certificate for Marion Evans, age 26, and Edward Stanwood, age 31, married in Chicago, Illinois. On the same website, a note says Stanwood married Frances Perot (June 24, 1889 – January, 1973). Your writer has failed to find a death date for Marion Evans or a marriage date for Frances Perot and cannot say whether Edward married twice.

Find a Grave says Edward and Frances are buried in Truro, Massachusetts. The website has a photo of his tombstone; the inscription says “Massachusetts” and “Lieut (J. G.) U.S.N.R.F.” (Lieutenant, Junior Grade, U. S. Naval Reserve Force).

* * * * **

Laura E. Richards

When Henry Kingsbury published his Kennebec County history in 1890, contributor Thomas Addison observed that Laura E. Richards’ “work as a writer covers, as yet, but little more than a decade.” Addison gave her one of the longer paragraphs in his chapter on literary people, and your writer suspects today she is the best-known of the writers described thus far in this sub-series.

Laura Elizabeth (Howe) Richards was born Feb. 27, 1850, in Boston, oldest of six children (the younger of her two brothers died at the age of three; her youngest sister, Maud [Howe] Elliott, was the only sibling who outlived her).

Richards’ father was Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in 1829. Her mother was Julia Ward Howe, best known as author of the 1862 poem titled The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

On June 17, 1871, Laura married an architect named Henry “Skipper” Richards. They lived in Boston until 1876, when Richards took a high-level job in the family paper mill in Gardiner, Maine, and the family moved there.

Laura Richards wrote more than 90 books, including children’s books, poetry and biographies.

Her earliest works were poems for children, published in St. Nicholas Magazine beginning in 1873. A biographical note on line, introducing her papers in the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection, calls her “the first prominent American writer of nonsense verse for children.”

On-line sources list such books as Baby’s Rhyme Book (1878); Five Mice in a Mousetrap by the Man in the Moon: Done in Vernacular, from the Lunacular (1880); The Joyous Story of Toto (1885) (the Google book title The Joyous Story of Toot is a misprint) and Toto’s Merry Winter (1887); and Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New (1932).

Baby’s Rhyme Book begins with a kitten’s story of her day: 7 a.m., trying unsuccessfully to put her mistress’s workbox in order; 9 a.m., sampling the cream on the breakfast table ­– “not so thick as it ought to be, but I do not complain” – since no one brought her food; 10 a.m., sharpening her claws on the annoyingly flimsy curtains; 11 a.m., moving a vase so she can nap on top of the clock; and so on.

Sources call Five Mice in a Mousetrap Richards’ first children’s book. By today’s standards, it is not for young children: 17 chapters, more than 220 pages and, like the previous book, a vocabulary that is not for beginning readers, but to be read aloud by a parent.

The first chapter opens with the Man in the Moon saying:

“Children, down on the planet which you call Earth, allow me to introduce myself to you! I am the Man in the Moon. I have no doubt that you know a good deal about me, in an indirect way, and that your nurses have told you all sorts of nonsense about my inquiring the way to Norwich – as if I didn’t know the way to Norwich! and various things equally sensible.”

(The reference is to a Mother Goose poem first published in 1833, with many variations through the years, about the Man in the Moon tumbling down and asking the way to Norwich. He “went by the south, and burnt his mouth” on cold porridge.)

The Toto books are a puzzle to your writer. The first is described on line as the story of a black dog, Toto; but a recorded book with the same title is about a cheerful little boy named Toto, who lives with his blind grandmother in a cottage in the woods (with a talking teakettle, among other amenities).

The boy persuades his woodland friends to visit his grandmother to keep her from being lonely. The first to arrive is a bear, unaccustomed to conversation; fortunately, raccoon, with squirrel on his back, two birds and a sleepy woodchuck soon arrive to help him.

The on-line description of Toto’s Merry Winter calls it the story of a young girl. The cover depicts a young boy, with woodland animals.

Tirra Lirra is a collection of Richards’ poems that were published in “St. Nicholas Magazine” from the late 1800s to the 1930s. It includes an often-mentioned nonsense verse called “Eletephony,” which reads:

Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant – No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone [Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I’ve got it right.]
How’er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee I fear I’d better drop the song
Of elehop and telephong!

Addison called Captain January (1890) not intended for young readers, but a portrait of “the ever fascinating child character.” It is the story of a lighthouse keeper who adopts a baby girl who survives a shipwreck and names her Star Bright. When others of her family are discovered (by a rather stretched coincidence), Star Bright chooses to stay with her adoptive father.

At the end of the book, readers know Star Bright will be leaving the lighthouse. A 1927 sequel, “Star Bright”, tells of her later life.

For adult readers, Richards edited two volumes of her father’s papers (1906-1909) and wrote several biographies. Her 1915 biography of her mother, coauthored with her sisters Maud (Howe) Elliott and Florence (Howe) Hall and titled Julia Ward Howe 1819-1901, won the first Pulitzer Prize for biography, awarded in 1917.

Richards’ 1931 autobiography is called Stepping Westward. It is described as a portrait of a pleasant life, including acquaintance with Boston-area literary figures and travels in Europe.

The Richardses bought a house on Dennis Street in Gardiner that they painted yellow and called the Yellow House. They had five daughters and two sons, born between 1872 and 1886.

Kingsbury, writing in 1892, said a fire at the family pulp mill in 1882 did $50,000 worth of damage; afterward, the mill was “rebuilt and enlarged.” The UNE source says it burned again in 1893, was again rebuilt and closed for good in 1900. Find a Grave says the Richards Paper Company merged with International Paper in 1900.

After leaving the paper business, Henry resumed his career as an architect. He and Laura spent their summers running Camp Merryweather, the boys’ camp they founded on Great Pond, in the Belgrades. Henry was camp director until 1934; the camp closed in 1937.

The couple supported many local causes. Kingsbury lists Henry Richards (and two other Richardses) as an incorporator of the Gardiner Water Power Company in 1880; the city water system began running in November 1885.

When the Gardiner Library Association was incorporated Feb. 14, 1881, Kingsbury said Laura E. Richards served on the first board of directors. Find a Grave says she founded the association, and Henry designed the library building and was a director.

In 1895, Laura founded the Women’s Philanthropic Union, of which she was president for 26 years.

Both died at Yellow House, Laura on Jan. 14, 1943, aged 92, and Henry on Jan. 26, 1949, aged 100. They are buried in Gardiner’s Christ Church cemetery.

Yellow House was a Federal-style house, originally built around 1810. In 1979, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Laura E. Richards House. A Dec. 24, 2022, fire did so much damage that the remains of the house had to be torn down.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.