Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Inventors – Part 3

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by Mary Grow

Martin Keyes

Here is Earl H. Smith’s introduction to Martin Keyes in Smith’s Downeast Genius, beginning with a comparison to the inventor profiled in this series two weeks ago.

“Like Alvin Lombard, Martin Keyes (1850–1914) was blessed with an inquisitive and clever mind, but unlike his burly tractor-making neighbor, Keyes was a diminutive and fastidious man. He kept a diary every day, and it was his thorough way that led him to claim an invention that established one of Maine’s most successful international industries.”

Keyes’ profile in the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame, in Appleton, Wisconsin, says he was born Feb. 19, 1850, in Lempster, New Hamp­shire. Smith wrote that he first worked in his father’s sawmill, then established his own business making “sleighs and carriages.”

The Hall of Fame and other sites credit young Keyes with designing a furniture line (called “exquisite”) and “a new type of fishing reel” that he used the rest of his life. An on-line site says he kept a pad and pencil by his bed in case he thought of an invention during the night.

Smith and the Hall of Fame disagree on where Keyes got the inspiration for his major invention, and neither provides a date. Smith wrote that while working at “a veneer mill in upstate New York,” he saw workmen eating lunches off thin scraps of veneer and came up with the idea of making disposable plates out of molded pulp.

His first efforts using veneer failed, Smith wrote. Later, Keyes became superintendent at Indurated Fiber Company, in North Gorham, Maine; it was there, the Hall of Fame writer said, that he got the idea of making the plates from molded pulp.

Both sources agree he began figuring out how to manufacture his disposable plates at Indurated, “with the support of his employer,” Smith added. After “several years of experimenting,” he designed a machine that would make the plates.

The section on the Keyes Fibre Company in the Fairfield history offers a third version of the story. According to that writer, Keyes became Indurated’s superintendent in 1884, and the North Gorham company already made “tubs, pails, and small pressed pulp ware.” When the North Gorham mill burned, Keyes transferred to another Indurated facility in northern New York, which was where he saw workmen eating off veneer chips from nearby plants.

The former Keyes Fibre Co., in Waterville/Fairfield, now Huhtamaki.

Two historians again offer conflicting views of what happened when Keyes tried to patent his machine. In the version in the Fairfield history, a “large paper manufacturer in eastern New York” offered him $100,000 to build a machine to make plates from pulp.

In 1902, Smith said, Keyes had the first machine manufactured, at Portland Iron Works (in Gorham, he had worked with a man associated with the company). Smith described it: “With flailing arms that hissed and groaned as they rotated through a process of dipping, drying, ejecting, and packaging, the finished apparatus resembled the complicated contrivances of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.” (See box.)

The Fairfield history say the upstate New York paper company “tried to claim the patent.” Smith’s version is that when Keyes applied for a patent, he learned that another worker had “stolen his idea” and already patented it.

The two versions reach the same conclusion: Keyes went to court and, after extended litigation, won. In Smith’s book and in an undated on-line history of the Keyes Fibre Company, written by the eminent local historian Dean C. Marriner, Keyes’ daily diary provided the evidence to convince a jury that he had done the work to design the machine and therefore earned the patent.

His next problem, the Fairfield historians wrote, was to find capital to start a factory. Eventually he connected with a Fairfield company, Lawrence, Newhall and Page, which ran lumber mills. This company had at Shawmut “one grinder installed already for the production of mechanical pulp.”

Keyes built “a small shack” on the side of the grinder building and built one experimental machine (Smith wrote that he rented space in the Shawmut plant). On Nov. 2, 1903, the Fairfield history says, the company he named Keyes Fibre started production, with that single machine.

The Hall of Fame writer said the first shipment of “pulp molded pie plates” went out in 1904 (other writers add that this sale led local residents to call the manufactory “the pie plate”).

Multiple sources credit a local man named Bert Williamson with helping Keyes get his plant up and running. Marriner wrote, “Williamson was at the inventor’s side when the first shipment of a carload of molded pulp pie plates, for the use of bakers, left the Shawmut plant on June 24, 1904.” Williamson remained with the company for two decades after Keyes’ death.

In 1905, the Fairfield history says, Keyes built “a small plant” with four machines. Smith wrote that early production was 50,000 plates daily, without explaining whether he was talking about one machine or four.

However, the Hall of Fame site says, Keyes’ plates were priced higher than competing products, described on-line as “stamped paper plates.” In early 1905, Keyes closed his plant for several months.

He acquired new investors, including his landlords, Lawrence, Newhall and Page, added more of his own money and reduced prices to restart production. After the April 18, 1906, San Franciso earthquake and fire, demand increased – one buyer ordered an entire carload of plates.

But then, Marriner wrote, Lawrence, Newhall and Page sold the pulp mill. The new owners let Smith continue to use their facility, but they sold within a year to another company not interested in wood products, forcing Keyes to relocate.

Keyes considered sites in Maine and elsewhere. Marriner said he and Williamson checked out possibilities in upstate New York over the 1907 Labor Day weekend, attending a parade in which many of the marchers were drunk.

Keyes, a Prohibitionist, reportedly said to Williamson, “Bert, you and I could never use that kind of labor.” (Smith located this incident in Portland, writing that when Keyes visited the city, “he was dismayed to find many drunken workers.”)

Keyes moved to Waterville, buying “a site immediately north of Lombard’s tractor factory” (per Smith) on the east side of what is now College Avenue.

Here he built what Marriner called “a modest brick building, which turned out its first plates on Sept. 20, 1908, and is still the nucleus of the giant plant that now stretches half a mile along the roadway,” partly in Waterville and partly in Fairfield. The plant, since 1999 owned by and called Huhtamaki, produces “a variety of pulp-molded products.”

Keyes died Nov. 18, 1914, in Fairfield. By that time, according to a Dec. 2, 1914, obituary in a New York weekly journal of the pulp and paper industry called simply Paper (found on line), Keyes Fibre could produce almost two million pie plates every 24 hours, providing an estimated “four-fifths of all the pie plates used in the United States and Canada.”

Your writer was unable to find personal information about Keyes except in the obituary. It recapped his career and said that survivors included his mother, Mrs. L. A. Gilmore, of Holyoke, Massachusetts; his widow, Jennie C. Keyes; two brothers, in Minnesota and New York; a sister in Holyoke; and a daughter, Mrs. George G. Averill.

Another source says Mrs. Averill’s first name was Mabel. Keyes’ son-in-law, Dr. George Goodwin Averill (1869 – 1954), took over the management of the company.

Keyes is recognized by Keyes Memorial Field (now Keyes Memorial Athletic Fields), on West Street, in Fairfield. The Fairfield history says his widow gave it to the town on Oct. 1, 1938.

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If Frank Bunker Gilbreth’s name sounds familiar, it might be because two of his 12 children, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Moller (Gilbreth) Carey, wrote a “semi-autobiographical novel” titled Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948. Cheaper by the Dozen was made into a movie in 1950 and has been variously adapted since.

The real Frank Bunker Gilbreth was born July 7, 1868, in Fairfield. He was the son of John Hiram Gilbreth (born in Augusta in 1833, died in Fairfield in 1871) and Martha (Bunker) Gilbreth (born in Maine about 1834, died in Montclair, New Jersey, about 1920), and the brother of Mary Elizabeth Gilbreth, born in Fairfield in 1864 and died in Brookline, Massachusetts, Aug. 8, 1894.

His main claim as an inventor, in Smith’s view, was as an efficiency expert. An on-line site called him “The Father of Management Engineering.”

Gilbreth started, Smith wrote, by graduating from Boston English High School and declining to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology in favor of becoming a bricklayer’s apprentice.

After 1895, Smith wrote, Gilbreth was “a self-employed general contractor” who built “mills, dams and power plants” in the United States and Europe. “Along the way, he invented a number of building tools and machines including a safety scaffold for bricklayers, conveyors, and an improved concrete mixer.”

Managing so many projects “led him to formulate the first cost-plus-fixed sum contract and to develop a number of systems to reduce waste, monitor work progress, and improve the productivity of his workers.”

In 1904, Gilbreth married a psychologist, Lillian Evelyn (Moller) Gilbreth (1878 – 1972). She worked with her husband on time and motion studies; the two “built a reputation as efficiency experts.”

Gilbreth died June 14, 1924, in Montclair, New Jersey. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Atlantic.

A gravestone in Fairfield’s Maplewood cemetery has his and Lillian’s names and dates. His parents and sister are also buried there.

Rube Goldberg machine

The expression “Rube Goldberg machine” means a very complicated way of doing a simple task. It recognizes the inventiveness of cartoonist, engineer and movie-maker Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg.

Born in San Francisco July 4, 1883, Goldberg earned an engineering degree at University of California, Berkeley, Class of 1904. He began his career as a sports cartoonist in California and moved to New York City in 1907, where he earned fame as a cartoonist for various newspapers and other publications.

Goldberg and his wife, Irma Seeman (married in 1916) had two sons, Thomas and George (who both changed their last names to George). Goldberg died Dec. 7, 1970.

Goldberg’s cartoons won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Wikipedia says he was one of the founders and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society (1946), whose annual award is named the Reuben Award.

On-line sites say the 2023 Reuben Award winner is Bill Griffith (full name William Henry Jackson Griffith), of New York City, best known as the creator of the “Zippy” comic strip.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Smith, Earl H., Downeast Genius: From Earmuffs to Motor Cars Maine Inventors Who Changed the World (2021).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Agriculture & Inventions – Part 2

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Above, a sawmill using a circular saw blade. Below, vintage circular saw blades.

by Mary Grow

Colby College historian Earl H. Smith found four more local inventors besides Hanson Barrows and Alvin Lombard, whose work was last week’s topic. They were William Kendall, of Fairfield, and Waterville; Laroy Starrett, of China and Newburyport, Massachusetts; and in the 20th century, Martin Keyes and Frank Bunker Gilbreth.

An on-line genealogy says Captain William J. Kendall, Jr., was born Jan. 2, 1784, in Kendall’s Mills. Kendall’s Mills, named after William, Jr.’s, father, was until 1872 the name for the part of Fairfield that is now the business district.

The Fairfield bicentennial history says the senior William Kendall was a Revolutionary War veteran. He is referred to as “General” Kendall, and Smith called him a “Revolutionary War general”; your writer found military records consistently say he was a private during the Revolution.

In 1780, he bought most of the area that is now downtown Fairfield and “took over” a saw and grist mill started two years earlier by Jonas Dutton. With it he acquired the first Fairfield dam that Dutton built between the west shore of the river and the westernmost island (now Mill Island).

The senior William Kendall married Abigail Chase on Christmas Day 1782. The Fairfield historians wrote that she lived upriver at Noble’s Ferry (near the present Goodwill School); Kendall paddled his birch-bark canoe to the ferry, where they got married, and let the current bring them back to Kendall’s Mills.

William, Jr., was born Jan. 2, 1784, probably in William Sr., and Abigail’s first house, “a log house near the river” close to the present intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue. An on-line genealogy lists the younger Kendall’s occupations as “millwright & mill owner, inventor.”

His first mill, according to the multi-authored chapter on businessmen in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s history of Waterville, was on Ticonic dam, south of the Waterville-Winslow bridge. No date is given.

A list of early patents found on line says Kendall’s patent for a “reciprocating sawmill” was issued Dec. 31, 1827. He was then from Waterville.

Smith agreed with the location, but not with the date. He wrote that there is disagreement over the first inventor of the circular saw, but probably the first one in Maine was “around 1845 in Waterville,” and was Kendall’s work.

Whittemore’s history accepts the 1827 date. Actually, 1827 might be late: another on-line source dates the patent to 1826, and Whittemore quotes a Jan. 4, 1827, Waterville newspaper article describing the Jan. 1 presentation of a gold medal to Kendall “in approbation of the improvement he has made in the circular saw.”

The newspaper report said Mayor Bolcom made the medal, which looked like a circular saw. (This statement makes sense only if “Mayor” is a first name rather than a title, as Waterville did not become a city until January 1888.)

The Waterville history says Kendall’s saw “was six feet in diameter, built of boiler plates riveted together; and the steel teeth, about three by four inches, were fastened in proportion by fifteen or twenty rivets for each tooth.”

Smith and the Fairfield historians agree on the importance of this invention. Smith said the circular saw “doubled the speed” of making logs into boards, with one circular saw doing the work of four up-and-down saws. Whittemore added that the saw turned a single pine log into “3310 feet of clear boards.”

Whittemore told the story of workers from a traveling “caravan” that charged 25 cents admission: the workers came to Kendall’s mill and contributed 25 cents each for a visit, “saying that it was more of a show to see the saw walk through a log than it was to see their own exhibition.”

The Fairfield historians wrote that the invention of the “circular log saw blade” “revolutionized the industry.” They added, “It is a sad commentary to note that General William Kendall did not live to see the success of his son’s invention, as he died that same year [Aug. 11, 1827, according to on-line sources].”

The Fairfield history says two generations of Kendalls ran the mills into the 1830s, when the family sold them.

In later years, Whittemore said, Kendall made “an invention pertaining to the casing of water wheels, which he patented” and installed in Fairfield and Waterville mills.

The on-line genealogy says Kendall married Sarah Chase, who was born Nov. 22, 1787, in Andover, New Hampshire, and died in Gardiner in January 1822, when she was only 34. The couple had seven children. Whittemore located the Kendall home “near the west end of Ticonic bridge.”

Kendall died Nov. 27, 1872, in Fairfield, according to the genealogy.

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With China-born inventor Leroy S. Starrett, the factual disagreements start with his name. Smith called him Leroy S. Starrett; a reproduction of patent number 47,875, issued May 23, 1875, calls the inventor “Le Roy S. Starrett.”

The China bicentennial history and on-line sources say Laroy S. Starrett. The Davistown Museum website lists him as “Laroy (often incorrectly recorded ‘Leroy’) S. Starrett.” (The Davistown Museum website says the museum in Liberty and Hulls Cove, Maine, that specialized in hand tools has closed.)

Find a Grave says his full name was Laroy Sunderland Starrett.

There is general agreement that Starrett was born April 25, 1836, in China, Maine. Find a Grave lists his parents as Daniel Dane Starrett (born Nov 25, 1802, in Francestown, New Hampshire; died Feb. 9, 1896, in South China), and Anna Crummett Starrett (born Jan. 27, 1803, in Boothbay; died March 3, 1875, in South China).

There is further agreement that one of Laroy Starrett’s job descriptions is “inventor.” Others include farmer, businessman, carpenter and tool manufacturer.

The China bicentennial history says when he was 17, Starrett began working for nearby farmers to earn money to help pay off the mortgage on the family farm. In 1855 or soon thereafter, he moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he either worked for a local widow on her farm or rented a farm (sources again differ).

Though he was a successful farmer, winning prizes at the local fair, he soon turned his attention to inventing metal gadgets.

The Find a Grave website has a 28-item list of his patents. Some are specific, like his first and best-known, the meat chopper or meat cutter for which he received a patent on May 23, 1865. It is followed by “shoe studs and hooks,” Jan. 28, 1868, and a “combination square”, with the patent dated Feb. 26, 1879.

The Newburyport, Massa­chusetts, history website adds “a washing machine and a butter worker.” In all, Starrett received 100 patents, many for precision tools, a lot of which are still used today.

The “combination square” is probably the invention Smith credited to Starrett, describing it as a “combination square and ruler with a sliding head.” Smith added, “The tool, essentially unchanged, is still routinely found in toolboxes of woodworkers everywhere.”

The Newburyport website writer believed Starrett’s invention of the meat cutter in 1865 led the family to move from rural to downtown Newburyport. Citing city directories, the website says Starrett made and sold meat cutters from an address on Merrimac Street (shown on contemporary maps as paralleling the Merrimack River).

In 1867 and 1868, Starrett “was advertising the meat cutter/chopper a lot in the local newspapers,” the website says.

The story continues, “He was so successful that he left Newburyport to manufacture his inventions…in Athol, Massachusetts, which is in the upper western part of the state near Gardner.”

There, Wikipedia says, Starrett founded L. S. Starrett in 1880, so he could manufacture the combination square he had patented two years earlier “and other precision tools.” The company has steadily grown and expanded into an international business; websites list Douglas Arthur Starrett as the current CEO and president.

Douglas Arthur Starrett lives in Athol, Massachusetts; he is 72 years old, according to the most up-to-date site your writer found. Patient genealogical research suggests that he is the great-great-great-grandson of Laroy Sunderland Starrett.

Laroy Starrett and Newburyport resident Lydia Webb Bartlett (Sept. 4, 1839 – Feb. 3, 1878) were married in 1861. They had five children, a son born in 1862 and a second, born in 1869, who lived only 13 months, according to Find a Grave.

The youngest daughter was born Jan. 10, 1878, in Athol. Lydia’s death less than a month later left Starrett with a 15-year-old son and three daughters, one an infant.

The China history says Starrett was deaf from about 1904 on. Widowerhood and deafness did not end his career, or “his generous concern for others,” the history says. He supported charitable projects in Athol, and in South China gave the Chadwick Hill cemetery a $1,000 gift in 1916, another $600 in 1917 for perpetual care of the Starrett family lots “and an even larger sum in 1920.”

Starrett died April 23, 1922, in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He and Lydia are among several generations of the Starrett family buried in Athol’s Silver Lake cemetery.

* * * * * *

Next week: a bit of information about Martin Keyes and Frank Gilbreth.

Up and Down sawmills

The Fairfield historians explained that sawmills in the 1700s and early 1800s used an up and down saw. Milton Dowe, in his 1954 history of Palermo, gave a more complete description of such a saw.

He wrote that water coming over a dam powered a water wheel. Attached to the water wheel was a crankshaft connected to an “arm” connected to the saw frame.

The saw frame was rectangular, “about six feet long and eight feet wide…with the saw fastened in the center.” The saw itself was similar to an ice-cutting saw and was “about six feet long and seven inches wide.”

Dowe continued, “The frame holding the saw was set in guides in an upright position in such a way that the short arm from the crankshaft, as the waterwheel turned, would push and pull the frame up and down.”

A carriage held a log that was pushed forward “by a rachet on a feed wheel” each time the saw blade came down. Each log was sawed into boards about an inch at a time, Dowe wrote.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Grow, Mary M,. China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Smith, Earl H., Downeast Genius: From Earmuffs to Motor Cars Maine Inventors Who Changed the World (2021).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

TEAM PHOTO: Fairfield PAL teams winners at Senior Bowl

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Fairfield PAL fourth and sixth grade senior bowl players painted their helmets with L’s and hearts as a way to support and honor Lewiston Strong as they played in Hermon, on Pottle Field, on Sunday, Oct.29. The fourth grade Bulldogs won, 18-0, and the sixth grade Bulldogs won, 20-0. Front row, from left to right, Conner Nadeau, Bryce Manzo, Tucker Graves, Wyatt Barnes, Dylan Gagnon, Landon Blaisdell, Levi Brann, Jackson Grenier, Brayden Dickson and Alex Frappier. Second row, Kaden LaChance, Clay Morse, Jackson Hansen, Chase Proctor, Jace Linnell, Kaiya Stevens, Wyatt Jones, Nathaniel Meswain, Mike Thomas, Ryker Miklos and Carson Bellows. Third row, Mason Guerette, Connor Stuart, Jacobi Peaslee, Hunter Pooler, Issac Dostie, Adrian Serrano and Hunter Lockhart. Back row, coaches Luke Peaslee, Gary Morse, Nick Nadeau, Blair Blaisdell, Brian Guerrrette, Toby Gagnon and Todd Proctor. (photo by Ramey Stevens, Central Maine Photography)

Fairfield election notes (November 2023)

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Residents of Fairfield may cast their ballots on Tuesday, November 7, 2023, at the Fairfield Community Center, 61 Water Street, Fairfield, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The local ballot will include:

  • Council: one seat, 3-year Term, there are three candidates
  • KWD: 1 Seat, 3-year term, there is one Declared Write-In
  • Charter Commission: six seats, 1-year Term, Write-In only contest; must be 18, qualified registered voters of Fairfield, willing to take the Oath of Office/Code of Conduct, and serve in accordance with the Town Charter and State Statutes (no candidates took out nomination papers by deadline)

ABSENTEE VOTING:

You may request an absentee ballot up to 90 days prior to election however;
Ballots are available 30 Days Prior to Election: October 9. Deadline to request Absentee is November 2. Absentee ballot s may be dropped off in the Drop-Box (24/7 Secure/no-contact).

Absentee Application: MAILERS: These are not sent from the municipality – these are facilitated by the political parties or third party drives – whatever manner you request an absentee, please submit only ONE request per election.

In-person: Voter Registration, Absentee Requests: Mon, – Fri,m 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Late Hours, October 30, 5 – 6 p.m.

Voter Registration:

Not Registered to Vote? Contact Town Clerk/Voter Registrar (ID & Proof of Residency required)

Closed Period: 21 days prior to election, thereafter all voter registrations must be in person with ID and Proof of Residency (Closed-Period/In-Person only commences on October 17, 2023). Voter Registration & General Information on Elections

Party Enrollment Changes: Voters wishing to change from one party to another will be automatically subject to the 15- day wait period, and must remain in the party three months. (There is no wait period for unenrolled voters to enter into a party)

Maine’s new semi-open primaries effective January 1, 2024: http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/21-A/title21-Asec341.html.

A registered voter not enrolled in a political party may participate, subject to the restrictions of section 145, subsection 3, in a party’s primary election without enrolling in that political party. An unenrolled voter may vote in only one party’s primary election.

http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/21-A/title21-Asec145.html.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Inventions, agriculture & others

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The Lombard log hauler, one of only six remaining, at its home at the Redington Museum, in Waterville. (photo by Roland Hallee)

by Mary Grow

Previous articles have talked about how agricultural work changed from the 1700s through the 1800s, as manpower was replaced by animal-power and then machines.

Other changes, too, helped farmers produce more or expend less effort or both. One example is the development of wire for fences. (Barbed-wire fencing was mentioned in the Sept. 7 issue of The Town Line, in the account of the skaters who burned part of a farmer’s stump fence for bonfires and redeemed themselves by putting up barbed wire as a replacement).

In his history of Windsor, Linwood Lowden wrote, “As early as the year 1861, it had been modestly estimated that an old-fashioned wood or stone fence takes a strip of land at least four feet wide out of cultivation.”

Losing a four-foot strip was not a problem while a farmer was battling to clear trees and rocks to make fields to grow food for his animals and his family. When he intended to sell some of what he raised, and when wood became scarce, he needed different fencing material.

Wire fences were the solution, Lowden wrote. Citing an 1882 Maine Board of Agriculture report, he said the first fence wire might have might have been made as early as 1815.

The industry was “still in its infancy” in the 1820s, with an individual worker “able to produce but from 15 to 40 pounds of fence wire per day.” By 1882, new technology made it possible for a single worker to “produce between 1,000 to 2,500 pounds per day.”

(There is an on-line controversy about who invented wire. The candidate list begins with Thomas Malham, Sheffield, England, in 1830; Jean Francois Martin, of France, about the same time; and other contemporary foundry owners, unnamed. Another historian calls their nominations “manifest nonsense.” He says Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs [3,000 B.C. and following centuries] made wire from gold, silver and copper, and wire made from iron “was achieved about 1450, in Augsburg [Germany].”)

Barbs came later. Wikipedia says Lucien B. Smith, of Kent, Ohio, got the first patent for barbed wire in 1867 and “is regarded as the inventor.” In 1874, Joseph F. Glidden, of DeKalb, Illinois, made enough “modifications” (or, another source says, “invented a practical machine for its manufacture”) to get his own patent.

The Board of Agriculture report said in 1874, the United States had 10 miles of three-strand wire fence (in 37 states). By 1882, there were 166,000 miles (in 38 states; Colorado was added in 1876).

* * * * * *

The invention of wire fencing, unlike the use of it, had nothing to do with any part of Maine. However, Maine had its share of inventors, including some from the central Kennebec Valley area.

Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins named two Vassalboro inventors who helped with farm and other outdoor work. One was the comparatively well-known Alvin Lombard (see below).

The other, more obscure, was Hanson G. Barrows, who, she wrote, invented a mowing machine & a snowplow; models extant in 1971 “go to prove what a true genius he was.”

(On-line sources on the origin of the mechanical reaper [which the web discusses in reply to requests for mowing machines] do not mention Barrows, focusing instead on the competition between Obed Hussey [1792-1860] and Cyrus McCormick [1808 or 1809 – 1883 or 1884] in the 1840s and 1850s. Colby College historian Earl H. Smith included both these inventors in his 2021 book, Downeast Genius: From Earmuffs to Motor Cars Maine Inventors Who Changed the World.)

Hussey was born in a Quaker family, in Hallowell; they moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts, when he was a child, and his work was done in Maryland and Ohio. Smith commented that Hussey realized Maine was an unfair place to test his reaper – not only was Maine farmland “hilly and difficult to plow, the real curse was the rocks, which often broke the shafts and blades of his machines.”

Smith connected Virginia-born McCormick with Maine only through his “War of the Reapers” with Hussey, which covered much of the United States; in 1851 was part of London’s Great Exhibition, “the first world’s fair”; and later moved to France and elsewhere in Europe.

Robbins wrote that Hanson Barrows (1831-1916) was the oldest of three sons and two daughters of Caleb Barrows and his wife (whose name your writer cannot find). She called Caleb an early settler in Vassalboro; Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, said he moved to Vassalboro from Camden in 1830.

Hanson Barrows spent his life on the farm he inherited from Caleb, named Twin Oaks, on Barrows Road (Kingsbury said the farm was “on the pond road,” probably meaning Webber Pond Road). In 1971, Robbins wrote, the Barrows family home still stood, with a view across the golf course to Webber Pond.

(Barrows Road ran west from Webber Pond Road to the section of Old Route 201 named Holman Day Road. On May 13, 2010, the Vassalboro select board ordered the road discontinued, without retaining a public right-of-way. Voters at the June 7, 2010, town meeting ratified the decision.)

Hanson Barrows and his wife, Julia E. (Wood) Barrows (1854-1942), are buried in Vassalboro’s Union cemetery. Their son, Leon Martell Barrows (Oct. 24, 1888 – March 5, 1956), in 1911 married Bertha May McCloud (1892-1913).

(Hanson’s brother Edwin [April 2, 1842 – April 20, 1918] was profiled in the article on Civil War veterans in the March 31, 2022, issue of The Town Line.)

* * * * * *

The Lombard house in Waterville, today, across from the public library. (photo by Roland Hallee)

Alvin Orlando Lombard was born June 15, 1856, in Springfield, Maine. Various sources say by the age of eight he was at work in the family mill – a shingle mill, in Lincoln, Maine, Smith wrote, where the “[s]toutly built, inquisitive, and energetic” boy “quickly mastered every woodland task from lumberjack to river driver and from stacker to mill sawyer.”

The child also built machines. Several sources mentioned his miniature water-powered sawmill (or wood-splitter – sources disagree) that he demonstrated by cutting up cucumbers.

Later, Lombard and his younger brother Samuel operated a blacksmith shop, in Waterville. Wikipedia said Alvin designed “sawmill and logging equipment” and Samuel supervised manufacturing.

Smith wrote that in the summer of 1899, Lombard, age 43 and already known as an inventor, shared a streetcar ride with his wealthy Fairfield friend, E. J. Lawrence. Lawrence “bemoaned the cost and cruelty” of using horses to haul harvested trees out of the Maine woods in the winter and asked Lombard if a machine could be used instead.

Two days later Lombard showed Lawrence a wooden model of a tracked vehicle. Lawrence liked it. The two built a full-size sample at Waterville Iron Works, “and on May 4, 1901, U. S. Patent #674,737 was issued for the Lombard Log Hauler, arguably the most significant invention ever to come from the State of Maine.”

Lombard’s machine was powered by “a steam engine with an upright boiler” and ran on steerable front skis and rear caterpillar treads. Here is Smith’s description: “A continuous belt of hinged steel lags (treads) was fitted over two pairs of geared wheels, allowing the heavy machine to pull itself along on a rolling carpet of steel…, like a caterpillar.”

These machines replaced “the work of 50 lumber-pulling horses,” one source said. Another called the log-hauler the model for “every snowmobile, tank and bulldozer ever built.” Even after trucks succeeded tractors in the Maine woods in the 1930s, the caterpillar tread continued to expand its uses world-wide.

The Maine Forest and Logging Museum website lists the six known Lombards remaining of the 83 built between 1900 and 1917. Two are at the museum in Bradley, the website says.

In addition to the log hauler for which he is best known, Smith wrote that Lombard’s commercially successful inventions included “a device for tossing (de-barking) pulpwood, and an apparatus that separated knots and sawdust from ground pulp.”

Smith said Lombard was most proud of an 1893 invention, “an automatic mechanical device…that maintained the speed and power of water turbines.” Lombard made and sold this useful regulator for six years before selling the patent and, according to Smith, dividing his time between his house in Waterville, where he had a basement workshop, and his country house in Vassalboro.

An online genealogy says Lombard and Mary Etta Bates (Sept. 8, 1856 – April 13, 1931) were married June 13, 1875, in Webster Plantation. They had one daughter, Grace Vivian Lombard Vose (Dec. 8, 1876-Aug. 24, 1947).

Alvin Lombard died Feb. 21, 1937. He, his wife and their daughter are buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove cemetery.

Online sources list two memorials to Lombard. Mount Lombard, in Antarctica, recognizes his contribution to driving over snow; and his Waterville house, now an apartment building, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Your writer, and Vassalboro Historical Society president, Janice Clowes, add Lombard Dam, on Outlet Steam, in Vassalboro, recently removed to allowed alewives to migrate into China Lake, and Lombard Dam Road.

Who invented the snowmobile?

Earl Smith nominated O. C. Johnson, of Waterville, who, inspired by Alvin Lombard’s log hauler, “is said to have built one of the first snow machines in 1909. It was ten feet long and powered by a ‘one lung’ engine.”

Your writer failed to find additional information on O. C. Johnson. On-line sources say early versions of the snowmobile were invented in 1911 by Harold J. Kalenze, of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada; in 1915 by Ray H. Muscott, of Waters, Michigan; in 1917 by Virgil D. White, of Ossipee, New Hampshire; in 1922 (much improved by 1935) by Joseph-Armand Bombardier, of Valcourt, Québec, Canada; and in 1924 (patented in 1927) by Carl Eliason, of Sayner, Wisconsin.

A snowmobile history found on the Volo Museum’s website credits White, Eliason and Bombardier, and agrees with Smith. The website says: “One of the earliest snowmobile ancestors is the steam-powered Lombard Log Hauler….”

Appeal to our readers

An appeal to our readers, especially those in Windsor, to help an out-of-state historian.

Peter Pettingill, from Barrington, New Hampshire, is seeking local information on an event in Windsor that he described as “the death of Charles Northey, Jr., which occurred in South Windsor, in October, 1905, resulting in the sensational six-and-a-half-week trial of resident Alice Spencer Cooper.”

He added, “It was the longest trial in Maine’s history at the time and was in the press from Maine to California and involved countless folks from your area and a lot of prominent Maine characters.”

Mr. Pettingill has done a lot of on-line research; he visited the area this past summer to check out graveyards and remaining buildings. He would appreciate more information from local people – does anyone have an ancestor in the Northey or Cooper family, or perhaps one who was involved in the trial?

In 2022 he published Porter: The Murder of David Varney (your writer found favorable reviews on line). His second book, titled The Murder of Mattie Hackett, is due out by the end of the year, he said.

For anyone with relevant information, Mr. Pettingill’s email address is pettingillp@yahoo.com. His postal address is 58 Waterhouse Road, Barrington, NH 03825.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Smith, Earl H., Downeast Genius: From Earmuffs to Motor Cars Maine Inventors Who Changed the World (2021).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Lawrence High School student wins Red Cross scholarship

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Nash Corson

Nash Corson, of Albion, helped save lives by hosting an American Red Cross blood drive and earned a $1,000 scholarship as a result of his lifesaving efforts.

As part of the Red Cross Leaders Save Lives program, the Lawrence High School junior hosted a blood drive at the Fairfield Church of the Nazarene which collected 25 pints of lifesaving blood. As a result, Corson was eligible to be entered into a drawing for a scholarship and was chosen as a winner.

Corson, 17, is an Eagle Scout who plans to pursue a career in welding. He credits his scout leader for inspiring him to host a blood drive in his own community.

“It is not easy saving lives, but it is worth it. In the end, it’s rewarding and satisfying. And I donated blood for the first time too,” Corson said.

The Leaders Save Lives program encourages community-minded high school and college students to host blood drives to help maintain the blood supply for patients in need of lifesaving transfusions.

Students can sign up to host Leaders Save Lives blood drives during seasonal timeframes throughout the year. For more information, visit RedCrossBlood.org/LeadersSaveLives.

The Red Cross experienced a significant blood and platelet donation shortfall in August, contributing to the current national blood and platelet shortage. To ensure the blood supply recovers, the Red Cross must collect 10,000 additional blood products each week over the next month to meet hospital and patient needs. By making an appointment to give this fall, donors can help ensure patients across the country keep receiving vital treatment.

Simply download the American Red Cross Blood Donor App, visit  RedCrossBlood.org, call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) or enable the Blood Donor Skill on any Alexa Echo device to make an appointment or for more information. All blood types are needed to ensure a reliable supply for patients. A blood donor card or driver’s license or two other forms of identification are required at check-in. Individuals who are 17 years of age in most states (16 with parental consent where allowed by state law), weigh at least 110 pounds and are in generally good health may be eligible to donate blood. High school students and other donors 18 years of age and younger also have to meet certain height and weight requirements.

Blood and platelet donors can save time at their next donation by using RapidPass® to complete their pre-donation reading and health history questionnaire online, on the day of their donation, before arriving at the blood drive. To get started, follow the instructions at RedCrossBlood.org/RapidPass or use the Blood Donor App.

Amaris Charland Graduates from Blackburn College

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Amaris Charland, of Fairfield, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art from Blackburn College, in Carlinville, Illinois,  during the institution’s 154th Commencement ceremony in May 2023.

PHOTOS: Lawrence High School homecoming

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Rocky and Marcia Buck get ready to kick off the Lawrence homecoming weekend. (photo by Ramey Stevens, Central Maine Photography)

Lawrence football players as they anxiously await to get suited up for the big game. From left to right, Gavin Lunt, Maddox Santone, Cameron Stewart, Preston Roy, Cole Quirion, Jack Pelletier, Hunter Curtis and Brandon Watson. (photo by Ramey Stevens, Central Maine Photography)

PAL football KSW cheerleaders at the homecoming parade included, from left to right, Addie Cohen, Jasmine Goodwin, Alexis Johnson and Aaliyah Slocomb. (photo by Ramey Stevens, Central Maine Photography)

PHOTO: Messalonskee varsity at homecoming

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Members of the Messalonskee varsity football team riding in the parade. (photo by Galen Neal, Central Maine Photography)

TEAM PHOTO: Messalonskee 5/6 youth blue team

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Front row, from left to right, Walker Bucknam, Teagan Cox, Austin Pearl, Blake Masse, Kael Segars, Jake Cyr, and Dax Allen. Middle row, Bennett Pottle, Aiden Desrosiers, Jamaica Jackson, Dom Veilleux, Everett Wadleigh, and Easton Gradie. Back row, assistant coach Pete Bucknam, head coach Dan Cyr, assistant coach Josh Desrosiers, and assistant coach Kris Segars. (photo by Missy Brown, Central Maine Photography)