Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Martha’s children

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by Mary Grow

This article continuing the Ballard family history will summarize information about three of Martha and Ephraim’s six children who lived to adulthood – space limits postpone the other three, and the end of Jonathan’s story, to next week. As related previously, three Ballard children died young, in a 1769 diphtheria epidemic in Oxford, Massachusetts.

The surviving children, in order of birth, were Cyrus, Lucy, Jonathan, Hannah, Dorothy (Dolly) and Ephraim, Jr. The first five were born in Oxford between 1756 and 1772; Ephraim, Jr., was born in 1779, after the family moved to Hallowell.

All but Lucy outlived their mother. The excerpts from Martha’s diary that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich included in “A Midwife’s Tale” show that Lucy had frequent health issues; there are several references to her being ill after the birth of one of the children (see below for varied numbers) she had by her husband, Ephraim Towne.

For example, in May, 1789, Ulrich wrote (using Martha’s diary as her source) that Lucy “fell ill of a fever” a week after giving birth (to the second daughter named Hannah, if WikiTree’s list below is accurate; Ulrich gave the child neither name nor sex). Because, Ulrich claimed, separating a newborn from his or her mother was a last resort, Lucy continued to try to nurse the baby; only after 10 days, when the child “seemed to be suffering,” did neighbors with babies assist.

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Cyrus Ballard was born Sept. 11, 1756, in Oxford. He never married. Ulrich described him as a “peripatetic [wandering] miller,” working in the family mill and living at home for a while, then taking a job at another mill, perhaps in Waterville or Pittston, at least once as far away as Lincolnville (almost 50 miles from Hallowell).

In November 1792, for example, Martha recorded that he came home after working in “Mr Hollowells” grist mill for 14 months, and two days later “went to Pittston and brot his chest & things home.”

When he was home, Cyrus ran errands for his mother, worked in his father’s mill, helped with gardening and other chores and was generally useful. Martha was seldom sentimental about him – or anyone else – in the entries Ulrich chose to copy; but she seemed to prefer his company to his absence.

In the fall of 1804, when Ephraim had been in jail since early January for failure to pay debts and Cyrus left home to “tend mill for Mr. Pullin at Watervil,” Martha wrote, “I wish him health and prosperity but alas how shall I do without him.” (The next day, she wrote, 13-year-old grandson Jack, Jonathan’s oldest son, brought water and cut wood for her.)

Neither Ulrich nor any other source your writer found said when or where Cyrus died.

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Lucy Ballard was born Aug. 28, 1758, in Oxford. On Feb. 4, 1778, in Hallowell, she married her first cousin, Ephraim Towne or Town (his mother, Hannah [Ballard] Towne, was Ephraim Ballard’s younger sister).

The couple moved to Winslow in 1784.

Ulrich’s choices from Martha’s diary show that she was the attending midwife when at least two of Lucy’s children were born (and probably all). Find a Grave says the Townes had nine children; Ulrich said 11.

WikiTree lists 10: 1) Ezra, born September 8, 1778, died November 14, 1811, in Farmington; 2) John, born February 4, 1780, died April 10, 1785; 3) Mary “Polly” (Towne) Smith, born November 5, 1781, died Nov. 27, 1871; 4) Martha “Patty,” born August 13, 1783, died June 29, 1820; 5) Lucy, born July 23, 1785, died April 24, 1802; 6) Hannah, born November 14, 1787, died February 8, 1788; 7) a second Hannah, born May 4, 1789, died July 10, 1793; 8) Dolly, born November 24, 1791, never married, died August 9, 1858; 9) John, born October 3, 1793, died in Madison, March 29, 1885; and 10) Betsey (Towne) Tilton, born April 13, 1797, died February 20, 1895, in East Livermore.

Ulrich, based on Martha’s writing, added to WikiTree’s list a daughter born in September, 1795, who lived only two hours, due to “an obstruction of breath at the Nostrils.”

First son Ezra was born seven months after Lucy married. Ulrich said Lucy’s, Jonathan’s and Ephraim, Jr.’s first children were all conceived before marriage, as were many others in those days.

Lucy Ballard Towne died Nov. 8, 1798, with her mother among those who attended her in her final illness. Ulrich did not supply details. WikiTree says Ephraim Towne later married Eunice Stackpole, by whom he had three more children.

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Jonathan Ballard was born in Oxford March 4, 1763. Ulrich, comparing him to Cyrus, called him the “flamboyant and rebellious younger brother.” Later she mentioned his “vandalism, fighting, and drinking.”

Jonathan’s “temperament” was a recurring theme in his mother’s diary.

In the summer of 1791, after Martha and Ephraim settled in their second home (see references to their moving and starting a new garden in the Nov. 13 issue of “The Town Line”), she wrote that Cyrus brought Jonathan’s “things” and his sow to the new house.

Ulrich thought Jonathan might have spent the early summer working for Peter Jones, owner of the house the Ballards had left. She quoted a Nov. 22 diary entry: the “gentlemen” chosen to decide the dispute between Peter Jones and Jonathan had awarded damages and court costs to Jones.

“I would wish my son might learn to govern his temper for the futer [future],” Martha wrote.

He didn’t. Martha’s March 17, 1804, unusually long diary entry described the “scean” that evening, after a young hired man named Lemuel Witham took “Son Lambard’s” (son-in-law Barnabas Lambard, Dolly’s husband) horse and sleigh to a tavern to bring Jonathan home, found him not ready and brought the horse and sleigh back.

Jonathan therefore had to walk home. He “Came here without his hat, took him [Lemuel] from his supper, push him out a dors, Drove him home to his house, damning and pushing him down and struck him. Shaw and Burr [neighbors] went on after to prevent his being diprived of life.”

Martha followed, “falling as I went,” and Dolly and others joined in. Jonathan was still “Cursing and Swearing he would go and giv him a hard whipping.” The men were separated for the night; Lambard brought Martha home; and she concluded her entry, “O that the God of all Mercy would forgiv him [Jonathan] this and all other misconduct.”

A few pages later, Ulrich revealed she had found a similar diary entry from two years earlier, when Jonathan’s wife Sally and their children were having supper at Martha’s and Jonathan came in “in a great passion about his white Mare being hurt.”

“It overcame me so much I was not able to sett up,” Martha wrote. Ulrich commented that this first outburst left Martha “immobilized, psychologically struck down.” In the second incident, however, “fear for Lemuel Witham’s safety propelled her into the middle of the fray, delaying her own collapse.”

Although Dolly and her husband helped Martha on March 17, Ulrich wrote that when Dolly and her sister Hannah visited March 18, they apparently were less helpful as they discussed what had happened. On March 20, Martha wrote that Jonathan “spake very indecently” to his mother; but the diary rebuked “all who do injure my feelings” and hoped “May they consider they may be old and receiv like Treatment.” (Martha was born in February 1735, so in March 1804 she would have been just past her 69th birthday.)

Ulrich also quoted an October 1804 diary entry in which Martha complained that Jonathan “treated me very unbecomingly indead. O that God would Chang his stubborn heart and Cause him to behave in a Cristion like manner to parents and all others.”

Ulrich found other information sources that led her to comment that “Of all the Ballards, Jonathan appears most frequently in county court records, both as a plaintiff and as a defendant.”

Between 1797 and 1803, she wrote, Jonathan Ballard was involved in 29 cases before the Kennebec County Court of Common Pleas, 19 he brought and 10 brought against him. He won 15 cases, Ulrich said.

Five cases involving Jonathan were appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, Ulrich found. He won one, getting $3.33.5 for reporting a man for selling liquor without a license.

Jonathan was sometimes in debt; Ulrich mentioned at least three brief imprisonments. His family found money to free him at least once. In May of 1809, six of his oxen were seized to pay a creditor.

In another comment on Jonathan, however, Ulrich wrote that he “was impulsive and perhaps given to hard drinking, but he was no ne’er-do-well.” Starting in 1787, he acquired a 200-acre farm on the north edge of Augusta, and by 1800 he owned a total of 348 acres in the town.

Jonathan married Sarah “Sally” Pierce on Feb. 23, 1792, in Hallowell — “reluctantly” Ulrich wrote, and only because she “had initiated a paternity suit against him.”

Elsewhere, Ulrich recorded that on Oct. 23, 1791, in the snow, Martha went to Sally Pierce’s to deliver the unwed mother of “a fine son.”

As Massachusetts law then required, she asked Sally who the father was; and Sally “declared that my son Jonathan was the father of her child.” Ulrich explained the law determined who should pay child support, and was based on the theory that a woman in the middle of giving birth wouldn’t lie.

Sally named her son Jonathan; he was known as Jack from infancy.

Neither Martha nor Ephraim went to Jonathan’s wedding, Ulrich said. Martha wrote that Jonathan first brought Sally and their son to visit her at the end of February, 1792. By March 2, Martha wrote that she “Helpt Sally nurs her Babe.” As was the custom, Jonathan and Sally lived alternately with his parents and hers for a month, settling into their own place (“went to housekeeping”) on April 4, 1792.

At Hallowell’s June town meeting, Ulrich wrote, Jonathan and half a dozen other newly married men were elected hog reeves (town officials responsible for rounding up roaming pigs and assessing any damage done), “a humorous acknowledgment by the town fathers that another roving stag had been yoked.”

On May 9, 1809, Martha recorded that Jack Ballard came to tell his grandparents he was leaving for Liverpool, and on May 10 “sett out for sea.” But he came back home May 15: “Could not get a Chance to go to sea.”

FamilySearch says Sally and Jonathan had 10 children; Find a Grave says 12; WikiTree says 13. Here is WikiTree’s list, longest but not necessarily most accurate.

1) Jonathan, born Oct. 24, 1791; 2) DeLafayette, born Feb. 4, 1793, died Oct. 9, 1833; 3) Hannah Kidder (Ballard) Pinkham, born Feb. 1, 1795, died May 21, 1886, in Massachusetts (FamilySearch says she died in 1818); 4) Ephraim, born Feb. 17, 1797, died Dec. 16, 1868; 5) William Y., born in 1799 (Find a Grave says 1795), died Jan. 29, 1896; 6) Sarah (Ballard) Pillsbury, born Jan. 11, 1801, died May 15, 1880, in Massachusetts; 7) Martha M. (Ballard) Barton, born Nov. 22, 1802, died in Clinton around 1845; 8) a son who was born and died April 3, 1804; 9) Samuel Adams, born April 19, 1805, died Nov. 27, 1806, aged one; 10) James Sullivan, born April 23, 1807, died Oct. 11, 1847; 11) Elizabeth Augusta, born April 3, 1809, died July 19, 1818, aged nine; 12) and 13), unnamed twin sons, born March 17, 1812, and died within days.

Ulrich wrote that after Sarah was born on Jan. 11, 1801, Sally was “burdened…with a new baby, a houseful of children, a temperamental husband, and a younger sister who needed constant attention.” The younger sister was Hitty Pierce, unmarried but not childless; the children (earlier, Ulrich said there were five; it is not clear how many were Sally’s and how many Hitty’s) included Hitty’s dying son, John, who had been badly burned in December, 1800.

To be continued

Main sources

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Women – Part 3

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by Mary Grow

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale focused on women’s lives in the Kennebec Valley around 1800, using midwife Martha Ballard’s diary (from 1785 to 1812) as a main source of information. A consistent emphasis was women banding together to help each other, within families and within the community.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

For example, in her description of the Ballard women and girls making cloth (see the Nov. 6 article in this subseries), Ulrich frequently noted how many people were involved. Describing the household in 1788, she mentioned Martha and Ephraim’s two youngest daughters, Hannah and Dolly, still living at home (Hannah was born in August 1769 and married in October 1792; Dolly was born in September 1772 and married in May 1795); nieces, Pamela and Parthenia Barton; and “a succession of hired helpers,” young women from the neighborhood.

Other married women came by to help, and might in return receive some of the products from the Ballard loom. Ulrich added that Martha traded with neighbors for cotton and, when the family had no sheep, wool. “The production of cloth wove a social web.”

Or, as Ulrich later expanded, women were in a “complex web of social and economic exchange” that connected households, creating a “community life” parallel to their menfolks’ political life. Women’s life was based on “a gender division of labor that gave them responsibility for particular tasks, products, and forms of trade.”

At one point, Ulrich compared the women’s textile production and their medical cooperation. She wrote:

“Spinning, like nursing, was a universal female occupation, a ‘domestic’ duty, integrated into a complex system of neighborly exchange. In both realms, training was communal and cumulative, work was cooperative, even though performed in private households, and the products remained in the local economy.”

Martha’s diary gives frequent illustrations of shared nursing, during illness and during childbirth, in the form of references to the presence of other women, relatives or friends or both.

Ulrich analyzed the role of women in healing in an early chapter in A Midwife’s Tale, based on diary entries from the summer of 1787. A “canker rash epidemic” was spreading in the central Kennebec Valley, causing many illnesses and a significant number of deaths, mostly among children. Ulrich said Martha reported five deaths, 15 percent of her cases.

(Canker rash was the name for what Ulrich said now would be called “strep,” or a streptococcal infection; the 1787 epidemic, she said, was scarlet fever.)

In her diary, Martha named four women who were with her and some of her patients. Each, in Ulrich’s analysis, had different skills and a different role.

Hannah Cool was a single woman, apparently an adult, who was living at Martha’s that summer and spent some time at a sick woman’s house, doing unskilled nursing or housework or both. Ulrich surmised her tasks would have included “brewing tea, spooning gruel, and emptying chamber pots.”

Sally Patten Ulrich called “a watcher.” Her main job was to sit with the patient, “offering comfort or conversation” and watching for any changes, especially anything that might indicate a need for treatment.

Tabitha Sewall was the wife of Captain Henry Sewall. They had lost their son to the epidemic earlier, and, Ulrich said, Tabitha was returning the help they had received, not specifically to any current patient, “but to the common fund of neighborliness that sustained families in illness.”

Merriam Pollard, mother of at least seven mostly grown-up children, represented “a group of perhaps ten women who served as general care-givers to the town. A frequent watcher at bedsides and attendant at deliveries, she was particularly skilled in laying out the dead.”

Pollard could do basic medical tasks, and, Ulrich wrote, had once handled a birth when Martha was not available in time.

Ulrich saw these women as examples of the female nursing community, whose members worked together and learned from each other.

Martha’s records of childbirths sometimes include names of other women present. She often called these attendants “her women,” meaning the mother-to-be’s women. Some were family members, some neighbors.

For example, on Oct. 3, 1789, at 11:30 a.m., Mrs. Goff had a daughter (apparently her first, as Martha wrote that the baby was Mr. Goff’s first grandchild). “Her marm [her mother-in-law, “Old Mrs. Goff,” who had come back from Boston the day before?], Mrs Bullin, Mrs Ney were my assistants,” and “Mrs. Jackson,” who had gone home earlier, came back at 1 p.m.

On Oct. 8, Martha stayed with Mrs. Daw or Daws from soon after 8 a.m. until evening, when “shee had her women” and Martha went home for the night. Mrs. Daw’s 11-pound son was born at 6 the next morning, with Martha in attendance.

On Nov. 18, 1793, Martha found Captain Meloy’s “Lady” in labor and had her women called, despite a rainstorm that ended in snow. When a baby girl arrived that evening, “Her attendants were Mrss Cleark, Duttun, Sewall, & myself.” (This was the delivery followed by the “Elligant supper” that was mentioned last week.)

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Over the years, family, temporary help, daytime and overnight visitors came and went in Martha’s house. Martha appreciated household helpers, her own daughters or other young women.

Ulrich saw a “secure supply of household help” (along with being past the age of childbearing herself) as essential for Martha’s career. The more hands at home, the freer she was to spend days and nights away.

Skills like weaving also benefited the younger women, helping them contribute to their present and future families. An alternative to teaching at home, Ulrich wrote, was to send daughters in their teens and early twenties into other households, as Martha’s sister, Dorothy (Moore) Barton did. Martha’s nieces, Clarissa, Pamela and Parthenia, often lived at Martha’s.

A propos of the Bartons, Ulrich mentioned in passing the significance of the sexes of a family’s children. Martha and her husband Stephen, she said, had six daughters “before a son survived”; this imbalance, she wrote, might help explain why they had “difficulty…establishing a farm in Maine.”

The Bartons went back to Oxford, Massachusetts, the family birthplace, in 1788, leaving three daughters in Maine, at least part of the time with Martha. Ulrich wrote that Parthenia (born Aug. 13, 1773) joined Martha’s household on May 26, 1788, and stayed, “with occasional periods away working for other families,” until she married on Nov. 18, 1792, at Martha’s house.

Even after they married and moved to their own homes, daughters might be called on to play a role in the family’s network. A specific example Ulrich mentioned involved Martha and Ephraim’s oldest daughter, Lucy Towne: when she had problems after her fifth child was born, her mother sent her younger sister, Dolly, to Lucy’s Winslow home.

During another period of ill health after a birth, Ulrich said, Martha had Parthenia Barton spend over a month helping at Lucy’s. And when Hannah Pollard, Lucy’s younger (and Dolly’s older) sister gave birth for the first time (probably in October, 1795), “Lucy sent her current helper (her sister-in-law Betsy Barton) to nurse her.”

Men were essential to these female networks: they performed a multitude of tasks, like providing transportation and ploughing gardens, without which their wives and daughters could not do their jobs. Similarly, women provided the meals and clean houses the men needed.

Given the number of children in many marriages, each also answered the other’s physical needs. (Ulrich never mentioned an unwanted baby, even when the mother was unmarried, and no matter how poor the family or how many other children. Without more information, it is impossible to decide whether every child was welcome; or Martha was tactful; or Ulrich chose not to raise the issue.)

Ulrich’s point was that although men’s work has gotten most of the publicity throughout history, women’s work was also vital, and also a group effort.

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Ulrich did not know why Martha Ballard started keeping a daily diary on Jan. 1, 1785. She offered three surmises: “a sense of history or a craving for stability, perhaps only a practical need to keep birth records.”

Whatever the diary’s value to Martha, she kept it faithfully, carrying pages with her when she expected to be gone from home for a few days. Ulrich said there are 9,965 daily entries, over more than 27 years.

Another question is how the diary survived after Martha died in late May 1812.

Ulrich wrote that the diary “probably” was passed to daughter Dolly Lambard’s family, first to Dolly and after she died in 1861 to her daughters, Sarah and Hannah. Sarah Lambard and Hannah (Lambard) Walcott gave the diary to their great-niece, Mary Forrester Hobart (1851 – March 21, 1940), in 1884.

Mary Hobart was 33 and an 1884 graduate of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary when she received the diary, then “a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages.” Ulrich explained the difficulties women had in entering the medical profession in the 1880s, and the appropriateness of a midwife’s diary coming to a female doctor.

Hobart’s cousin, Lucy Lambard Fessenden, organized the loose pages and “bound them in homemade linen covers” in two volumes, and Hobart “had a mahogany box made” to store them. She “cherished” the diary, which she, her family and her colleagues found worth reading.

In 1930, Hobart, by then almost 80, donated the diary to the Maine State Library. Ulrich gave two motives: a desire to make it more accessible to historians, and concern for its safety “in her wooden house.”

The library promised Hobart a transcript of the diary, but never delivered it. She did eventually receive a copy of Charles Nash’s excerpts, collected for his proposed 1904 history of Augusta (which was finally published in 1961; Ulrich gives credit to Maine State Librarian Edith Hary [1922 – 2013]).

The Maine State Library’s website says Martha Ballard’s diary is in its Special Collections. “Although the original handwritten diaries are extremely fragile and not available for public use, print and microfilm facsimiles can be viewed.”

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The exact date of Martha Ballard’s death is unknown. Her last delivery was at 4:30 a.m., on April 26, 1812; she and “Mrs. Heath” had been waiting since early on April 24.

Martha was not feeling well those days; one or another of her married daughters and daughters-in-law was usually with her. The last diary entry, on May 7, recorded visits by “Daughter Ballard [either Jonathan or Cyrus’s wife] and a Number of her Children,” two other women and Reverend Mr. (Benjamin) Tappin, who “Converst sweetly and mad a prayer adapted to my Case.”

The next relevant diary entry Ulrich found was not by Martha, but by a local male diarist, Henry Sewall. On May 31, he wrote, “Funeral of Mrs. Ballard at Augusta.”

Ulrich found another piece of evidence in the June 6 transfer of responsibility for a cow Ephraim and Martha had been renting (after the one they owned went to pay their taxes in February 1810) from Ephraim to daughter Dolly Lambard’s husband, Barnabas.

The only obituary was apparently a single sentence in the June 9, 1812, issue of The American Advocate: “Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years.”

Main sources

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Women: Ballard – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

Martha (Moore) Ballard (1735 – 1812), to whom readers were introduced last week, cannot be considered a “typical” housewife, because she was a practicing midwife, out of the house on business much of the time. A housewife she undoubtedly was, however, maintaining a home for her husband, surveyor Ephraim Ballard, whose job was often more time-consuming than hers, and six of the nine children she bore between 1756 and 1779 (three died in a 1769 diphtheria epidemic).

Martha was atypical in another way: if any of the women around her kept daily diaries, they have not survived. Martha kept a diary from Jan. 1, 1785, until shortly before her death in May 1812. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich used it as the basis for her unusual book on women’s lives in 1800s Maine, A Midwife’s Tale, published in 1990.

Last week’s article, based mostly on Ulrich’s history, talked about two kinds of household duties: washing and cleaning, and working with cloth. The latter, in Martha’s time, started with growing some of the materials (flax, for example). Then women made them usable as cloth, wool and the like and wove, sewed or knitted them into household necessities and clothing.

Two other categories of housework will be explored this week, cooking and gardening (the latter defined broadly to include the livestock in the Ballards’ lives).

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When the Ballards moved into their first Hallowell house in 1778, Ulrich said there were seven of them, the parents and five children, Cyrus, Jonathan, Hannah, Dorothy (Dolly) and Ephraim, Jr. Oldest daughter Lucy Towne was living in Winslow with her husband. The diary records visitors almost daily, often for a meal, sometimes overnight.

Despite the number of mouths to feed, Martha said very little about preparing meals in the diary entries that Ulrich chose to copy. Once or twice she commented that “We brewed,” without specifying whether she meant beer, tea, coffee, or something more unusual.

An example: on Oct. 7, 1789, she recorded that a female visitor “dind” (dined), and later two men “drank tea” (one of them had brought her a barrel of smoked herring three days earlier, whether as a gift or a payment she did not say). Presumably Martha or her daughters fixed lunch and made – or “brewed” – tea.

Four days later, on Oct. 11, she wrote that “We had Chickens for dinner.” No information on who cooked them or how, or even whose chickens they were.

In the fall of 1792, there were two weddings in the Ballards’ house. On Oct. 28, Hannah married Moses Pollard; on Nov. 18, Martha’s niece, Parthenia Barton, married Shubael Pitts. Martha said nothing about food on either occasion.

She only occasionally mentioned cooking equipment. On Nov. 2, 1792, after visiting two women whose babies she had recently delivered (both were doing well, or “cleverly,” to use her favorite description), she bought from the store run by one of the husbands two iron kettles, one spider, two pepper boxes and two “dippirs.” (Whether “spider” meant a frying pan or a skimmer, your writer does not know.)

On Nov. 14, she was back in the store, spending a fee she had just received for a January delivery on two “puter” (pewter) dishes, a coffee pot and half a dozen tablespoons.

When Martha did mention cooking, she omitted details, at least in most of the couple hundred diary entries Ulrich chose.

For example, on Jan. 3, 1796, Martha had been with a woman who was apparently ill, not pregnant (there is no record of a birth) since the evening of Jan. 1. She came home about 11 a.m. and “Bakt and Cleand my hous and did other matters.”

On Jan. 17 that year, Martha fed husband Ephraim, daughter Dolly and her husband, Barnabas Lambard, and four other people “roast Chickins” before she was called out overnight waiting for a birth.

The next day, Martha delivered two baby boys, one at 11 a.m. and another at 4:30 p.m., each his mother’s first child. When she got home at 8 p.m., Martha recorded that her brother Ebenezer was staying overnight.

“I made Bids, washt dishes, swept house, and got supper. I feel some fatagud [fatigued],” she wrote.

Toward the end of the month, she recorded one day feeling so sick that she resented the “nesescity” of fixing breakfast for her husband and son Cyrus. Later, though, Cyrus brought home a young friend, and with her help, Martha found the energy to make “chicken, minc, apple and pumpkin” pies and some “flower bread.”

On a snowy Feb. 7, 1801, Martha wrote that she stayed home and “We [unspecified] bakt and Churned 7 lb 14 oz. butter.” Ephraim, son Cyrus, son-in-law Moses Pollard and Dr. Daniel Cony were also at the house at least part of that day.

In May 1809, while very busy planting a garden and doing other outdoor chores, as well as housework, Martha found time to write that she “Bakt brown Bread.”

She occasionally recorded a meal she did not cook. On Nov. 18, 1793, in a rainstorm that ended as snow, she went to “Capt Meloys,” where his “Lady” gave birth to a “fine daughter” a little after 8 p.m. Martha shared an “Elligant supper” with the other attendants, spent the night and the next day got paid on the spot and “returnd home after dineing.”

* * * * * *

The Ballard house was surrounded by gardens, and the family had livestock. Gardening was primarily women’s work in the early 1800s (perhaps because the menfolk had too much else to do), and the domestic animals and birds were at least partly the housewife’s responsibility, too.

Among the Ballards’ domestic animals were horses, oxen, cows, swine (also referred to as pigs or hogs), sometimes sheep, turkeys and chickens.

Chickens, turkeys, cows and at least one horse seem to have been around all the time. Martha intermittently mentioned eating chicken or turkey; killing turkeys and stripping turkey feathers; cows’ health; and using her husband’s horse to get to a patient’s house.

Ulrich commented on Martha’s preoccupation with her turkeys in the spring of 1792. One was nesting on April 7; in May, Martha repeatedly recorded putting eggs under nesting birds. On May 26, the black turkey hatched 14 chicks, and by June 2, there were 42, followed by 14 more in mid-August – “not long,” Ulrich commented, “before the first of the spring brood was ready for the table.”

Sheep were not always part of the farm. Ulrich quoted a Dec. 8, 1790, entry in which Martha noted their four new sheep were “the first we have ownd this 14 years.” By the spring of 1804, they had more than 20.

Gardening references were not always in the spring and summer: on Oct. 4, 1789, Martha picked green peas from the garden, and on Dec. 17, 1800, she had fresh green parsley to add to her gravy.

To support her professional work, Martha raised what Ulrich called “remedies from the earth,” medicinal plants like anise (used as a laxative), camomile, coriander, hyssop, marigolds (especially for skin conditions, WebMD says), mint (Healthline says mint helps with digestion and may relieve breastfeeding pain), mustard, parsley, saffron (used, Ulrich said, “to treat jaundice in newborn children”) and sage.

In addition to growing herbs, Martha and her helpers gathered native plants to use as medicine. Ulrich mentioned burdock, comfrey, sweet clover and Solomon’s seal, among others.

Outdoor work came into prominence in the spring of 1791, after the Ballards moved to a different house in April. (They moved again in December 1799, to son Jonathan’s farm on the northern edge of Augusta.) A combination of diary excerpts and Ulrich’s summaries showed the complications of starting a new garden.

The family completed their 1791 move on April 21, and on April 22 Martha wrote, “At home. Began my gardin.”

First, Ephraim had to plow a piece of land; then, Martha wrote, she dug out and raked away grass roots. Ulrich reported bean, pea and corn plants by mid-May, and “beet greens for dinner.” On Aug. 23, Martha picked a ripe watermelon.

The “old cow,” driven to her new property by the Ephraims, father and son, had a calf on May 3, but the calf soon died. A hen lost 11 of her 16 chickens before young Ephraim brought her to the new house.

The diary has occasional references to Martha treating the animals. It was probably in the spring of 1794 that a lamb was born “with the Entrales all out”; Martha stuffed them back in, sewed up the wound and wrote that the lamb “suckt & walkt afterwards.” In November, 1795, she mentioned “Nursing my Cow,” whose “Bag is amazeingly Sweld.”

In the spring of 1809, Martha – then 74 years old – recorded her early gardening in detail, amid reports of visits to family and friends, housework and midwifery.

On May 9, she “sett Turnips & Cabbage stumps.” (Ulrich explained cabbage stumps as roots of the previous year’s cabbage, over-wintered in the cellar.) On May 10, she started removing the winter banking from the house foundation and planted cucumbers and three kinds of squash; on the 12th, she planted more squash and cucumbers.

On May 13, Martha took off more banking and planted more squash. It rained on May 14; on May 15, despite afternoon showers, Martha “dug ground” west of the house and on the east side planted “squash, Cucumbers, musk and water mellons.” Meanwhile, Ephraim (who was 84) and their son Jonathan ploughed “our field.”

May 17 was a warm, spring-like day. Martha “Planted long squash by the hogg pen, sowd pepper grass, sett sage and other roots,” while her husband “mode Bush & dug gardin.”

The next day, Ephraim continued digging the garden and set hop poles (hops are usually associated with beer, but Wikipedia says they are used in herbal medicine, too), while Martha “Sett Parsley & 3 quins trees by the pigg pen.” She also had currant bushes, gooseberries, and apple, cherry and plum trees.

On May 19 and 20, Martha “workt in gardin,” without details.

From May 22 through May 31, Martha recorded something about her garden work all but three days. One of those days she delivered James Caton’s wife’s eleventh child and fifth son. The other two, she was busy delivering her daughter Hannah Pollard’s ninth child and sixth daughter, who weighed 11 pounds.

Between births, she “sett” two more “quins” trees and an apple tree; planted potatoes; set “Leutis plants” (lettuce, perhaps?) and strawberries; sowed string peas (Wikipedia seems to think these are snap peas) and the next day, “pees &c”; planted “Crambury, Brown, & hundred to one beens south of the house”; transplanted cucumbers (the cucumbers and squash east of the house were up by May 22); and “sett” squash and cucumber plants.

Elsewhere, with a footnote referring to a June 1808, entry, Ulrich explained that Martha started many of her plants in raised beds “on the sunny side of the house” and moved them to the main garden after the ground warmed up. She credited Martha with soil improvements, like adding manure, some brought from behind the outhouse.

Produce must have been preserved in various ways for winter and spring eating, but this work is seldom described in the diary entries Ulrich transcribed. One fall 1809 entry refers to making pickles and putting cider in the cellar.

On May 25, 1809, Martha fell off her horse as she came home from the Catons’. By early June, Ulrich wrote, she had a sore and swollen left knee, either from the fall or from “the continued exertions of the garden,” that was keeping her awake at night.

Ulrich quoted the June 9, 1809, diary: “I am still lame but have workt in my gardin all day.”

Quince trees still grown in Maine

Quince tree

Quince trees still grow in Maine, according to Roberta Bailey, of Seven Tree Farm, in Vassalboro, author of an article on the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardners (MOFGA) website. Bailey wrote that the fruit originated in western Asia, east of the Mediterranean, some 4,000 years ago. Brought to the Americas by European settlers, in New England especially it was popular in home gardens and commercially. One use was making quince cheese, by boiling quince fruit “all day until it was thick like cheese.”

Quince tree fruit

Main sources

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolutionary War Veterans Windsor, Palermo, China

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Gen. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, October 1777.

by Mary Grow

This article is the last – for now – about the Revolutionary War’s effects on central Kennebec Valley towns. It again covers towns not on the river.

As previously mentioned, one effect was a post-war population increase throughout the valley, including veterans, most with families. Some of these men and their descendants became prominent in their new towns, shaping growth and development.

Missing from the historical record, at least as your writer has found so far, is all but bits and pieces of information on how the war affected its veterans. Occasionally there is a reference to a physical disability that could have been war-related.

Surely men in the 1780s suffered the equivalent of PTSD; how was it manifested, and what if anything was done about it?

When a group of veterans gathered on the porch of the general store on a warm summer day, did they one-up each other with war stories? Or was the subject forbidden?

Did a Maine veteran enjoy hunting, because he’d become an expert shot? Or was firing a gun to be avoided, because it brought back unpleasant memories?

* * * * * *

Revolutionary veteran William Halloway or Holloway is buried in Windsor, where he lived for at least some of his last 40-plus years. He was born June 18, 1747, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts; there he married Mary Molly Trask (born May 1, 1756) on June 23, 1773.

An on-line Daughters of the American Revolution site says in 1775, he bought land on a lake in Hallowell, “perhaps intending to trade in furs and timber.”

The DAR writer surmised that he changed his plans in reaction to the beginning of the war in April 1775. Another site says he enlisted in Bridgewater; the DAR writer said he sold his Hallowell land “in January 1777, while on furlough from the army.”

The website shows his hand-written pension application, in which he says he enlisted in the Massachusetts line as a private for a year in January 1776, and again for three years in the Continental service beginning in January 1777. The DAR record says he was promoted to corporal and sergeant in the Massachusetts line.

Just before his second term ended, Halloway enlisted yet again for the duration of the war. In 1782, he fell ill and was hospitalized for almost a year; then he was furloughed and sent home.

Halloway wrote that he served in “the taking of Burgoyne” at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777, and in the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, in June 1778, and wintered at Valley Forge.

The application is undated, but Halloway wrote that he was 71 years old, making it around 1818. He was then living in Malta, Windsor’s name from 1809 to 1820.

The DAR site says the Halloways had four sons and three daughters. The writer added that oldest son, Seth, was born “the year he left for war” (another site says 1773) and the second son, John, seven years later (Oct. 1, 1780), “bespeaking the long absence he endured from his wife and home.”

Three of the last four children were reportedly born in Maine, two in Hallowell and the last-born, Lydia, in Windsor in 1789.

Halloway died April 17, 1831, and Mary died August 11, 1844, both in Windsor.

* * * * * *

Oliver Pullen, born Oct. 17, 1759, in Attleborough, Massachusetts, was living in Palermo in 1836 (or 1835; the documents on line seem inconsistent, with a decision dated before the application was filed), when he applied for a land grant under the 1835 state law intended to benefit Revolutionary War veterans.

In his application, he said he enlisted from Attleborough in January, 1776, in a Rhode Island regiment in the continental army. He was honorably discharged in Fishkill, New York, at the end of December 1776.

In June 1777, he said, he re-enlisted as a private in the same regiment, for three years. Again, he wrote, he served the full term and took his “final and honorable discharge” July 24, 1780, near Morristown, New Jersey.

Summarizing his military service, Pullen wrote that he “was at the retreat under General [John] Sullivan from Long Island and at the battles at Long Island [August 1776] and White Plains [October 1776].” The inscription on his gravestone in Palermo’s Greeley Corner Cemetery Old says he served in Colonel Henry Sherman’s regiment.

(Palermo has two Greeley Corner cemeteries close together on Route 3, opposite the Second Baptist Church, where on-line maps show the intersection of Route 3 and Sidney Road. Find a Grave calls them “Old” and “New” with the adjective at the end of the name.

(Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that the town bought the land for the first cemetery in 1807. An on-line photo of its sign dates New Greeley Cemetery 1901.)

Pullen’s petition was rejected. A note says he “Did not serve three years”: under it is another note, “35 m 20 d.”

FamilySearch says Pullen married Abigail Page (born in 1761, per WikiTree, or 1767, per FamilySearch) in July 1782, in Vassalboro. They had at least four sons, this source says.

Sargent Sr., was born Jan. 9, 1784, in Winthrop, when – by FamilySearch’s dates and math – his father was 24 and his mother was 17. Gilbert was also born in 1784, apparently later, as his father’s age is listed as 25 and his mother’s as 17; his birthplace was Palermo. Stephen Sr., was born in 1786, in Palermo. Montgomery A. was born in 1794, no birthplace given.

Howard listed Gilbert Pullen as one of the privates in the Palermo militia unit that marched to Belfast in September 1814 to meet a threatened British attack during the War of 1812.

FamilySearch says Oliver Pullen was in Winslow in 1800 and in Waterville in 1810 (the part of Winslow that was on the west bank of the Kennebec River became Waterville in June 1802, so he probably changed towns without moving).

Abigail Pullen died in 1803, aged 36, FamilySearch says; WikiTree says she lived until Jan. 2, 1857, and died in Attleboro, Massachusetts. FamilySearch’s report that she is buried in Readfield, Maine, almost certainly confuses her with another woman.

Oliver Pullen died Dec. 8, 1840, according to his gravestone. Abigail is not among the 10 other Pullens buried in Palermo’s Greeley Corner Cemetery Old. Gilbert and his wife, Nancy (Worthing) Pullen seem to be the only members of the second generation.

* * * * * *

In addition to Abraham Talbot, profiled last week, two more black Revolutionary veterans are reportedly buried in China, Luther Jotham and his younger brother, Calvin Jotham.

An interesting on-line National Park Service article, in the form of a story map titled “Luther Jotham: A Journey for Country and Community” summarizes Luther’s life, including his Revolutionary service. The author began by saying that his record sounds like that of a typical Massachusetts militia man, who trained regularly to be ready for an emergency – except that before the Revolution, Massachusetts law prohibited Blacks from training in peacetime.

The writer said Jotham was born about 1759, in Middleborough, Massachusetts. His parents moved the family to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, before the Revolution, perhaps for better job opportunities.

After the December 1773 Boston Tea Party and the British occupation of the city, Bridgewater, like many other towns, organized a volunteer Minute Man company. Free Blacks were allowed to join, and Jotham did.

The writer pointed out that his motives might have included the stipend (one shilling for each half day of training) or the hope of improving his “social standing” in the mostly-white town.

The Bridgewater troops’ first quasi-military experience was in April 1775, when British forces moved from Boston to Lexington and Concord and met American resistance. The writer explained that in January 1775, British General Thomas Gage had sent troops to Marshfield, a Loyalist town about 30 miles southeast of Boston and about 20 miles northeast of Bridgewater. Militia units, including Bridgewater’s, marched to Marshfield, but did not attack.

On Aug. 1, 1775, Jotham enlisted in the Plymouth County militia and served for five months, stationed in Roxbury, Massachusetts, near Boston. He enlisted again as a militia man in January 1776; came home briefly in April; and re-enlisted in the summer of 1776.

During this period, he was for the first time involved in fighting. The website writer said his unit was in the Battle of Harlem Heights in September and the Battle of White Plains in October. When his enlistment expired Dec. 1, 1776, he again returned to Bridgewater.

Jotham enlisted for the fourth and apparently last time in October 1777. He served only briefly, because, the writer said, militia units were sent home after General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga on October 17.

Back in Bridgewater, Jotham married for what the writer said was the first time and WikiTree says was the second time. WikiTree names his first wife as Elizabeth Cordner, whom he married Sept. 24, 1774, and who died in or around 1777.

The sources agree he married Mary Mitchel, born about 1755; WikiTree says the wedding was April 8, 1778, in Brockton. According to the National Park Service writer, the couple had three children, Lorania, Lucy, and Nathan.

In January 1779, this source says, Jotham bought 15 acres of land, thereby changing his status (in town records, apparently) from “labourer” to “yeoman,” that is, a “man who farmed his own land” instead of working for other people.

The writer found that Jotham’s life was not easy, at least partly because of his race. In November 1789, he and his family, and his brother Calvin, were among “scores of… working class families” whom the town selectmen ordered to leave town – a practice called “warning out,” used to get rid of residents seen as likely to become paupers in need of town support.

In the early 1800s, Jotham did leave town, moving his family to Vassalboro, Maine, for unknown reasons. There he bought 20 acres of land.

By 1818, when he applied for a pension as a Revolutionary veteran, his resources had dwindled. He wrote that his possessions included “a house, small hut, a few tools and household items.” He had “one cow, three sheep, and one pig.”

He claimed an annual income of less than five dollars, and added: “I am by occupation a labouring man but from age and infirmity unable to do but little.” An annual pension of $96 was approved in 1820.

The National Park Service writer said that Jotham’s wife Mary and all three children died in Vassalboro. In 1816, he married Reliance Squibbs (his second wife in this account, not mentioned by WikiTree), by whom he had two more children, Mary Anne and Orlando. Reliance died before Jotham got his pension in May 1820, and a witness to his application said the two children had also died.

On Dec. 20, 1821, in Vassalboro, Jotham married a woman named Rhoda Parker. Rhoda, listed as a mulatto in the 1850 census, was born in 1787 in Georgetown.

Find a Grave says she and Jotham had at least one son, born in Vassalboro in 1829 and named Calvin (after his uncle). The Park Service writer said there were at least three children of this marriage.

(The younger Calvin Jotham died Dec. 17, 1883, in Sherbrooke, Québec, where he and his white wife had a daughter and three sons between 1863 and 1880.)

By August 1827, Jotham was considered to need a guardian to manage his affairs, and a man named Abijah Newhall was appointed. Not long afterwards, the family moved to China, where Jotham died June 2, 1832, aged 81.

Rhoda applied for a widow’s pension in 1860. She died in October 1869, in China. Find a Grave says by then her last name was Watson; apparently she remarried after Jotham’s death.

Your writer found much less information about Luther Jotham’s brother, Calvin, and no details about his military service.

Find a Grave says he was born in 1759 in Middleborough, Massachusetts. He died in March 1841 in China and is buried in the town’s Talbot Cemetery. This site says he fathered a daughter and a child who died in infancy, both in Brockton, Massachusetts; it names no wife.

Main sources

Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Winfree honored for academic success

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Karen Winfree

Seven Maine community college students were honored Wednesday for their academic success and campus and community involvement at a luncheon ceremony, at Maple Hill Farm, in Hallowell. The event was hosted by the Maine Community College System (MCCS) Board of Trustees.

They included Karen Winfree, of Fairfield, Kennebec Valley Community College.

In addition to being recognized as Students of the Year, they each received a John and Jana Lapoint Leadership Award in the amount of $1,000.

Mr. Lapoint was president of UF Strainrite in Lewiston and a trustee of the Maine Community College System. After his death in 1995, his widow, Jana Lapoint, served on the Board from 1995 to 2006 and helped establish the fund for the annual awards.

CAMPAIGN 2024: Candidates address issues concerning Maine voters (Part 3)

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Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in 18th & 19th centuries, Part III

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Hallowell Academy

by Mary Grow

Hallowell & Supply Belcher

The local responsibility for public education made it one of the first topics for voters in each newly-organized 18th and 19th century Maine town. Frequently, historians wrote, it was not easy for people in a low-cash economy to raise money to pay a teacher, provide instructional materials and maintain a building.

(Nor to fund other civic duties. For example, James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta that residents of Hallowell [from which Augusta separated in February 1797] sent no representative to the Massachusetts Great and General Court from 1775 until May 1783. The reason, he said, was probably the cost, which the town had to bear; and the incentive in 1783 was a newly- created system of fining unrepresented towns.

(Similarly, North said, taxes Maine towns owed to the Massachusetts government frequently went unpaid in whole or in part. In November 1784, the legislature authorized payment in commodities – beef, pork, wheat, oats, Indian corn, butter, cordwood, boards and tow cloth. Kennebec Valley goods were to be delivered at Bath.)

This and following articles will provide town-by-town information about Kennebec Valley voters’ early steps in creating local education systems, and about the systems they created, which differed considerably from contemporary public schooling.

One major difference, for most of the 19th century, was that towns were divided into school districts (which were frequently reorganized). Many town histories include lists of districts as of various dates, with their boundaries as presented at town meetings.

Most of the time, each district had its own one-room, or occasionally two-room, school building for primary-school students. Grammar schools, the equivalent of a modern high school, were less common.

District boundaries mostly ran from one landowner’s lot line to another’s, making it difficult for modern readers to locate a district. Sometimes there was a more helpful reference to a town line.

Another feature of these early schools that has changed markedly was the length of time students spent in them. Until late in the 19th century, there was no standardized school year; local voters and officials set their own school terms.

One on-line source pointed out that the school day was shorter, too, because students needed time to walk from home and back. This source said school might run only from about 9 a.m. to about 2 p.m.; and “homework,” despite its name, was done in school.

Textbooks were not standardized between towns or even within a town; they were not even available all the time.

Especially in the early years, teachers were likely to be young men – or, increasingly, women – who finished district school and came back to share their learning with younger children, without further training.

* * * * * *

Three of the towns covered in this series were incorporated on April 26, 1771: Augusta (as part of Hallowell), Vassalboro (including Sidney) and Winslow (including Waterville and Oakland).

North wrote that Hallowell’s first town meeting, held May 22, 1771, was primarily to elect town officials. Meeting again July 1, voters raised 16 pounds for “schooling” (and 36 pounds for laying out the first roads).

Captain Charles Nash wrote, in his Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, that “the prompt provision for schools attests the loyalty of the settlers to the policy of their Puritan forefathers, who ordained (in 1647) that every town of fifty houses should provide for the instruction of its youth.”

At the 1772 annual meeting, voters defined “schooling and preaching” as necessities, and appropriated 15 pounds for both, Nash said (his sentence makes it impossible to tell whether he meant “both” or “each”).

Where the money came from is unclear; he wrote that 96 “persons who were assessed for taxes” paid almost 14 pounds. His examples suggested the local tax base in 1772 was similar to 2024’s: a merchant was assessed for his stock of goods, a landowner for his real estate.

(North thought it worth mentioning that as early as these 1772 meetings, inhabitants were charged a Massachusetts provincial tax, apportioned according to the value of each householder’s real and personal property.)

In 1773, North wrote, voters at the March annual meeting directed their selectmen to procure two months’ preaching plus as much more as they had money for, and only as much schooling as they had money for. They showed the same priority in 1774, appropriating 20 pounds for preaching, half that amount for schooling.

The Revolutionary War was hard on Hallowell, disrupting civil proceedings (North’s emphasis) and the economy (Nash’s). Many able-bodied men were off fighting, or had been killed or wounded. The currency depreciated drastically; military demands for men, money and supplies were onerous; state taxation increased. And the winter of 1780 was exceptionally long and cold.

In 1776, North said, Hallowell voters held only one town meeting, at which they elected town and county officials – “no money [was] raised for any purpose.” Not until the spring of 1778 did a Hallowell town meeting again raise money for education (and preaching and other necessary purposes).

In 1780, Hallowell voters held 10 meetings, North said. At the annual meeting in March, they raised 200 pounds for education (and the same for preaching), and in May added another 100 pounds.

The next year they repented: North quoted a March 12, 1781, vote saying “That the town if it think proper may raise money for preaching and schooling at some after meeting.” On July 10, voters approved 50 pounds for preaching; if they funded education in 1781, North failed to mention it.

Nash found that Hallowell created eight school districts in 1787, four on each side of the river, and divided 80 pounds equally among them for a year’s expenditures. Each district had its three-man school committee, charged to “provide schooling, and see that the money is prudently laid out.”

The east-side districts ran from the north boundary downriver into what is now the separate town of Chelsea. Three west-side districts ran from the Vassalboro (later Sidney) line downriver to take in present-day Gardiner; the fourth included the area west of those districts.

Nash commented that the districts were created two years before they were legally required. “Thus promptly the founders of the town lined off the yet untamed wilderness into educational preserves, for the benefit of their youth.”

In 1790, North wrote, town meeting voters were feeling so poor they raised no money for preaching; but they appropriated 100 pounds for education (and thrice that amount for roads).

* * * * * *

Hallowell had what Nash labeled “the first incorporated institution of learning in the district of Maine.” Hallowell Academy was chartered by the Massachusetts legislature in 1791 and opened May 5, 1795. (William B. Lapham, who wrote the Hallowell chapter in Kingsbury’s history, said Berwick Academy was chartered on the same day in 1791; an on-line source says the Governor of Massachusetts signed Hallowell Academy’s charter on Aug. 31, 1791.)

The legislature gave the Academy a land grant its 20 trustees could sell – Lapham said the area became Harmony, a Somerset County town northwest of Skowhegan.

The Academy’s first building burned in 1804. A new one opened in 1805, and in 1807 the trustees bought a Paul Revere bell for it, for $78, Nash wrote. This building was succeeded in 1839 by a brick one.

The Academy served area students. After Augusta separated from Hallowell, it had its own post-primary school from to 1804 to 1807 and again after 1836; in the interval, Nash wrote, “the Hallowell Academy, then in its full vigor, offered the youth of Augusta ample facilities for obtaining a good education.”

Lapham said after town high schools began to proliferate, the Academy lost students. It survived through the Civil War, and in 1873 became Hallowell Classical Institute, “a Congregational school and a feeder for Bowdoin College.”

An on-line Hallowell history site dates the Classical Institute to 1872 and says it offered a high school education for both sexes, with boarding and day students, until it closed in June 1888.

Hallowell’s early music composer: Supply Belcher

Supply Belcher

One of Hallowell’s 1787 district school committeemen was Supply Belcher, a man whose name historians of music will recognize as an early composer, choir director, singer, violinist and compiler of books of psalms.

Born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1751, Belcher served in the Revolutionary War, marching to Cambridge with the Stoughton Minutemen to meet the British on April 19, 1775, and later becoming an army captain

After the war, he opened Belcher’s Tavern, in Canton, Massachusetts, where he hosted local musicians for informal concerts. In 1785, he and his family moved to Hallowell (why? your writer asks in vain); in 1791, they moved to Farmington, where he lived out his life.

Historians agree that he was popular and respected as a musician and as a local civic leader.

Wikipedia says Belcher “apparently led Farmington’s first choir,” which was well reviewed. A local newspaper nicknamed him “The Handel of Maine” after a 1796 concert featuring his Ordination Anthem, which the Wikipedia writer says partly resembled sections of Handel’s famous Messiah.

Another source, however, says, “Handel” was more likely used as a generic term to denote a well-known composer, not necessarily because Belcher’s and Handel’s music were similar.

In Farmington, Belcher taught school; served as selectman in 1796 and 1797, town clerk and tax assessor; was a justice of the peace and a magistrate; and represented the town in the Massachusetts General Court in 1798, 1799, 1801 and 1802.

Belcher married Margaret More in May 1775. One on-line source says they were married for 60 years and had 10 children; Find a Grave lists three sons and three daughters, born between 1780 and 1814.

According to this source, their first son, Samuel, died Oct. 27, 1814, at the age of 34. When they had another son on Dec. 8, 1814, they named him Samuel. The second Samuel lived until May 22, 1886.

Youngest daughter, Eliza, born in 1787, died when she was seven. The inscription on her gravestone reads: “My little mates when you come near / Look at my grave and drop a tear.”

Middle son, Hiram, born in 1790, went to Hallowell Academy, got a law degree and began practicing in Farmington in 1812. He was Farmington’s town clerk from 1814 to 1819, the town’s Maine state representative in 1822, 1829 and 1832 and its state senator in 1838 and 1839. From 1847 to 1849, he served in the U. S. House of Representatives as a member of the Whig party.

Belcher’s first published piece was in 1788; by 1819, he had published more than 70 works, mostly in the typical tunebook of the time that contained works by multiple composers. His only collection of his own works is titled The Harmony of Maine: An Original Composition of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (Boston, 1794). One critic referred to his “original and creative spirit in psalmody.”

Belcher died June 9, 1836, in Farmington. His widow died May 14, 1839.

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

EVENTS: Water Dance set for April 20

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Spiral Water Dancing. (photo courtesy of wetdryvac)

by Jonathan Strieff

Spiral Water Dancing organization founder Christine Little. (photo courtesy of wetdryvac)

On Saturday, April 20, the Spiral Dance Collective will perform an original work as part of the 6th Bi-annual National Water Dance, hosted at Granite City Park, 94 Water Street, in Hallowell. The event will be one of dozens of performing arts events taking place simultaneously around the country intended to celebrate and take responsibility for the protection of rivers, lakes, and bodies of water meaningful to local communities.

The performance will take place at 4 p.m., and will be preceded at 3 p.m., by a community dance workshop, in which local residents will be invited to participate in co-creating the final dance that will be live streamed across the nation.

The Spiral Dance Collective is an intergenerational dance group founded by Christine Little, of the Rive Studio, in Hallowell, to create, “site specific dances that explore our relationship to local issues people and spaces.” The group has collaborated with the Hallowell Conservation Commission, the Hallowell Climate Action Committee, and Maine Sculptors Jon Doody, Mark Herrington, and Isabel Kelley to bring their performance to Granite City Park, on the banks of the Kennebec River.

The groups participation in the National Water Dance is sponsored in part by the Hallowell Arts and Culture Committee, Vision Hallowell, and Perennial Renewables. The event is free and open to the public and the Hallowell Community Flood Recovery Fund will be present to accept free will donations. For more information, contact riverstudiohallowell332@gmail.com.

Jonathan Strieff is a freelance contributor to The Town Line.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Some early Maine poets

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by Mary Grow

As promised last week, no more ponds for a while. Instead, your writer turned to Thomas Addison’s chapter on Literature and Literary People, in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. She hopes you will enjoy meeting a few of the writers mentioned.

Addison’s definition of literature covers almost anyone who wrote: newspaper people, historians, educators and sundry others. Your writer has chosen arbitrarily to begin with selected poets.

Many of the names Addison mentioned have no on-line references. Others are listed only as contributors to a book titled The Poets of Maine: A Collection of Specimen Poems from over Four Hundred Verse-makers of the Pine-tree State, compiled by George Bancroft Griffith and published in 1888.

Your writer found excerpts from this book on line. The samples she read have brief biographies and selected poems.

* * * * * *

Amos Lunt Hinds’ book,
Uncle Stephens

A large number of writers came from Augusta, Gardiner and Hallowell. Addison listed surprisingly few from Waterville or towns farther north, and not many from smaller towns.

An exception was the Town of Benton, identified as the home of poets Amos Lunt Hinds and Hannah Augusta Moore.

Amos Lunt Hinds (born in Benton Nov. 12, 1833, or sometime in 1834; died in Benton, April 24, 1908) was the son of Asher Hinds (born in Benton May 2, 1792; died in Benton April 23, 1860) and Lucy Harding (Turner) Hinds (1801 – July 2, 1883), who was either the first or second of his two wives (sources disagree).

The on-line description of Forgotten Books’ 2018 reprint of Amos Hinds’ 1905 Uncle Stephen and Other Verses includes Hinds’ introduction. The poet said the poems were written over 40 years; some had been published in newspapers and magazines, locally and out of state. Hinds collected them into a book “at the suggestion and request of old friends, to whom they are submitted with affectionate greeting.”

An article in the Jan. 10, 1906, issue of the Colby Echo (found on line) republishes a Dec. 27, 1905, Waterville Evening Mail article on the publication of Uncle Stephen. Hinds is described as a Colby graduate, Class of 1858, and a resident of Benton Falls.

The unnamed writer of the article mentioned several poems with local connections.

The one titled The Soldiers ‘ Monument was “read at the unveiling of the monument in this city on May 30, 1876.” The newspaper quoted one verse:

Long let this musing soldier stand,
‘Neath free New England skies,
To all that love the fatherland,
Type of self-sacrifice.

General Isaac Sparrow Bangs, in his military history included in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history, describes the founding of the Waterville Soldiers’ Monument Association in March 1864, before the Civil War ended. Its purpose was to provide a memorial to honor Waterville residents who died in the war.

The first fund-raising events were that month. After a Nov. 29, 1865, event, Bangs wrote, the association apparently went dormant until June 1875. By then, donations and interest totaled $1,000, and the town gave a matching sum.

Association committees were formed to design the monument and find a site. Two more fundraisers May 16 and 17, 1876, added $350, and the Waterville Soldiers’ Monument, in what is now Veterans Memorial Park, at the corner of Elm and Park streets, was dedicated on Tuesday, May 30, 1876, Memorial Day.

Another of Hinds’ poems, Old Block House, was about Fort Halifax, in Winslow, the 1906 newspaper writer said.

Uncle Stephen, “the first and longest poem in the volume,” honored Stephen Crosby, whom the writer called “one of the early settlers of that portion of Winslow which lies adjacent to Benton Falls.”

Crosby owned a grist mill, and during 1816, the Year without a Summer, he “endeared himself to his generation and his memory to other generations, by refusing to profit by the distress of his neighbors, continuing to sell corn, of which he had a store, at the ordinary price.”

On-line genealogies say Amos Lunt Hinds married Lettice Orr Reed (1834 – Jan. 26, 1910), and name only one child, Lucy Turner Hinds (1866-1966). The “Colby Echo” article says Amos was the father of Asher C. Hinds, Colby 1883 (but see box on the Hinds family).

* * * * * *

Poets of Maine says Hannah Augusta Moore was born in Wiscasset on March 15 of either 1827 or 1828. Her grandfather was Colonel Herbert Moore, of Waterville; her father, Herbert Thorndike Moore, is identified as “of New York City.”

Her mother, who is not named, and her father were both poets, the biography says. The family moved to Philadelphia when Hannah was “a small child” and she started writing there. Then she lived in New York (City?) “for many years.” In 1886, she “came back” to Benton, which she called “dear native land.”

The biography does not say when Hannah had previously lived in Benton, and the following text is not helpful. It says that after her mother died (no date given), she “attended school at Waterville, Me.”

As soon as Moore settled in Benton, Ephraim Maxwell, publisher of the Waterville Mail newspaper, began publishing her work.

Moore wrote under pseudonyms, including Helen Bruce and Wanona Wandering. The biography explains that she avoided “Hannah” “from a dread that she might be supposed to consider herself a second ‘Hannah More.'”

(Hannah More [Feb. 2, 1745 – Sept. 7, 1833] was a British writer whose works included plays and poetry, mostly religious.)

The biography says it was Moore’s own choice to live “like a hidden singer in a hedge.” Her poems were available in the United States and in Europe, and many were set to music. One collection, titled “Plymouth Notes,” sold 40,000 copies in Europe in its first year.

The biography ends by quoting “June in Maine,” one of Moore’s best-known poems. The first stanza reads:

Beautiful, beautiful summer!
Odorous, exquisite June!
All the sweet roses in blossom,
All the sweet birdies in tune.

The poem urges readers to go outside and enjoy

All the dim aisles of the forest
Ringing and thrilling with song;
Music—a flood-tide of music—
Poured the green valleys along.

And

Buttercups, daisies, and clover,
Roses, sweet-briar, and fern,
Mingle their breath on the breezes—
Who from such wooing could turn?

* * * * * *

Frances Parker Mace

Frances Parker (Laughton) Mace is another Maine poet, who was a friend of Moore’s. Wikipedia says she was born in Orono, Jan. 15, 1836 (or, one source says, 1834, citing her tombstone), daughter of Dr. Sumner Laughton and Mary Ann (Parker) Laughton.

The family moved to Foxcroft in 1837. Mace’s education included Latin “and other advanced subjects” at Foxcroft Academy when she was only 10 years old. Her first poems were published when she was 12, some in The New York Journal of Commerce, Wikipedia says.

The Laughtons moved to Bangor, and Mace graduated from Bangor High School in 1852. Wikipedia says her most famous poem was published in the “Waterville Mail” when she was 18, suggesting a Waterville connection by 1854 – did she and Moore meet then? Your writer found no evidence.

This poem is titled Only Waiting. It was inspired by a friend who asked an elderly man in a poor-house what he was doing and received the reply, “Only waiting.”

The poem begins:

  Only waiting till the
shadows
  Are a little longer grown,
  Only waiting till the
glimmer
  Of the day’s last beam
is flown;
  Till the night of earth
is faded
  From the heart, once full
of day;
  Till the stars of heaven
are breaking
  Through the twilight
soft and gray.

It goes on to describe the man’s readiness to leave his weary life for the company of angels.

The poem was published in the Waterville Mail under the pseudonym “Inez.” Later, a hymn-writer named Mrs. F. A. F. Wood-White, from Iowa (according to one on-line source), claimed she had composed it, creating a dispute that was eventually resolved in Mace’s favor.

Mace married a lawyer named Benjamin Mace in 1855, and for the next 20 years was busy with eight children, four of whom died young. She began writing again when their eighth child was two years old, with a poem published in Harper’s Magazine.

Her collected poems were published in the 1880s, before and after the family moved to San Jose, California, in 1885. She died in Los Gatos, California, on July 20, 1899.

NOTE: For those interested in seeking out poems mentioned in this article, your writer found on line:

Two recent reprints of Amos Lunt Hinds’ Uncle Stephen and Other Verses: a 2016 hardcover edition by Palala Press, and a 2018 paperback by London-based Forgotten Books.

Three reprints of The Poets of Maine: in 2008 by Kessinger Publishing (Vol. 2 only); a 2017 paperback by Forgotten Books; and a 2023 paperback by Creative Media Partners, LLC.

Listed as available on amazon.com, in January 2024: copies of Frances Laughton Mace’s two poetry collections, Legends, Lyr­ics and Son­nets, originally published in Boston, Mas­sa­chu­setts, by Cupples, Upham, in 1883; and Under Pine and Palm, originally published in Bos­ton by Tick­nor, in 1888. No publisher is given.

More about the Hinds family

On-line sources say poet Amos Lunt Hinds had three younger brothers and a younger sister. The brothers are listed as Albert D. Hinds (1835-1873); Asher Crosby Hinds (1840-1863); and Roswell S. Hinds (1844-1864). The sister was Susan A. Hinds (1837-1905).

Find a Grave website says the Asher Crosby Hinds who was born Jan. 7, 1840, in Clinton, served in Company G of the Third Maine Infantry during the Civil War. He started as a corporal and mustered out as a sergeant. The website quotes the beginning of his obituary from the April 2, 1863, Piscataquis Observer, which says he died in Benton at the age of 23.

Amos and Asher’s brother Albert and his wife Charlotte (Flagg) named their first son, born in 1863, Asher Crosby Hinds.

Wikipedia says Asher Crosby Hinds, born Feb. 6, 1863, and died May 1, 1919, represented Maine’s First District in the U. S. House of Representatives for three terms, from 1911 to 1917.

The article says he attended Coburn Classical Institute and graduated from Colby College in 1883; worked for a Portland newspaper beginning in 1884; and from 1889 to 1911 held clerical positions in the Maine House of Representatives, working for the Speaker.

Hinds edited two procedural manuals, Wikipedia says, an 1899 edition of the Rules, Manual, and Digest of the House of Representatives and in 1908 Hinds’ Precedents of the House of Representatives.

The article cites a 2013 study showing the Precedents “successfully altered the behavior of House representatives, as they became less willing to appeal decisions of the chair.”

This information leads your writer to conclude that Rep. Asher C. Hinds was Amos and Lettice Hinds’ nephew, not their son.

Amos Lunt Hinds and a dozen other family members are buried in Barton-Hinds Cemetery on Eames Road in Winslow, according to Find a Grave.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Scout leader recognized for quick action with choking boy

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Ryan Avery, right, accepts the Medal of Merit from Chuck Mahaleris, chairman of the Kennebec Valley District. (photo courtesy of Chuck Mahaleris)

by Chuck Mahaleris

Cub Scout Pack #672 and Scout Troop #672 gathered at Spare Time Recreation, in Hallowell, to end the Scouting year with a night of family bowling. However, the biggest part of the evening was not all of the pins that fell but rather the awarding of the Medal of Merit to Troop #672 leader Ryan Avery who saved a boy from choking earlier this year.

Avery, who lives in West Gardiner and teaches science at Gardiner Regional Middle School, was working the lunch detail this past September when he noticed a student who was choking. A witness, who did not wish to be identified, observed Avery talk to the young man and ask if he was choking. The boy nodded and Ryan immediately began the Heimlich Maneuver. In short order, the bottle cap from his water bottle was removed from the youth’s mouth and he was able to breathe fully. The witness then described that Ryan ensured the young man was ok and quietly cleaned up the area and went about his duties.

Earlier this month, Avery had completed 16 weeks of EMT classes and now Ryan has even more training under his belt should the need arise in the future.