Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the Kennebec Valley – Part 3

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Typical 19th century brass band.

by Mary Grow

Band music

Another type of music in the central Kennebec Valley from early days of European settlement was band music. It was often, but especially in later years not inevitably, associated with military organizations; and like other forms of music, got limited attention in most local histories.

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James North, in his Augusta history, sometimes mentioned parade music, presumably provided by a band, as in his description of former president George Washington’s funeral procession in Augusta on Feb. 22, 1800.

North wrote that the procession was headed by a military escort. It included an infantry company, followed by musicians with “drums muffled, instruments in mourning,” followed by an artillery company.

By 1805, North wrote, Augusta had two military companies, and a group of young men persuaded the legislature (still in 1805 the Massachusetts General Court) to authorize a light infantry company.

The Augusta Light Infantry, which appears frequently in North’s history, was organized in the spring of 1806. North listed its officers and its musicians: fifer Stephen Jewett (the same Stephen Jewett who played the bass viol in church beginning in 1802? – see the July 27 issue of The Town Line) and drummer Lorain Judkins.

Some of the women connected with infantry members created and presented a company standard, with the motto “Victory or Death.” North described the Sept. 11, 1806, presentation as followed by a parade and a ball (presumably at least the ball and probably the parade included musicians).

By the time the Light Infantry was part of the local Federalist party’s July 4 parade in 1810, there was definitely a band. North wrote that its members politely stopped playing as the parade passed the house where Judge Nathan Weston was addressing the rival Democratic party celebration.

Another association between music and the military is the lists of men who fought in the War of 1812. Kennebec County historian Henry Kingsbury and many local historians listed soldiers (in 1812 and later wars) by name and rank, including musicians.

Most 1812 companies had either two or three musicians, though Kingsbury listed only one apiece for two of Vassalboro’s companies. The majority are described unspecifically as “musicians,” but Kingsbury mentioned a drum major and a fife major from Augusta.

By July 4, 1832, North again described two separate parades by two political parties, with multiple bands and military units. The National Republicans’ parade included “the Hallowell Artillery and Sidney Rifles, each with a band of music,” and the Hallowell and Augusta band, which he said was “one of the best in the State.” The Democrats’ parade included some of the Augusta Light Infantry and a band from Waterville.

There was an Augusta band in 1854, when Augusta city officials (the town became a city in 1849) decided the annual July 4 celebration should include recognition of the 100th anniversary of the building of Fort Western. Events included an extremely elaborate parade, with the Augusta Band providing the music.

And on April 18, 1861, as the Civil War began, North wrote that “the Augusta Band, playing patriotic airs” (including Yankee Doodle), led Augusta’s Pacific Fire Engine Company as members marched to the homes of leading citizens to ask their reactions to the rebellion.

(Their visits started with Governor Israel Washburn, Jr., and included his predecessor, former Governor Lot M. Morrill. North commented that Republicans and Democrats alike expressed support for the federal government.)

By August 1863, either there was another band or the Augusta Band had a second name. North described the return of two volunteer regiments whose members’ nine-months enlistments were up.

The 24th Regiment got to Augusta at 10:30 p.m. Aug. 6, by train; a large number of dignitaries and ordinary citizens and the Citizens’ Band escorted the soldiers to the State House for a welcome and a banquet (after which they slept on the State House floor, too exhausted to continue to Camp Keyes). The 28th arrived around noon Aug. 18; their welcoming parade included the Citizens’ Band and the Gardiner Brass Band, and their refreshments were served on the lawn south of the State House.

In 1864, according to North, it was the Augusta Band that on June 3 escorted the first trainload of wounded men to the new military hospital at Camp Keyes, in Augusta.

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In the village of Weeks Mills, in the southern part of the town of China, there was in the latter half of the 19th century an all-male brass band that the China history says “was more a marching band than a dance band,” because its concerts were mostly outdoors.

Sometimes there were concerts in “a town public hall” that was the second floor of a building on the east side of the Sheepscot, north of Main Street (which is called Tyler Road on the contemporary Google map). There was also a bandstand, “with a flagpole,” that band members built at the junction of North Road (now Dirigo Road, perhaps?).

Quoting a former resident named Eleon Shuman, some of whose family were in the band, the history adds, “Few of the band members could read music, and the band director transcribed their pieces into a simpler notation called the tonic sol fa method which they could follow.”

Oakland also had a town band by the late 1880s. In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond wrote that the organizers of the 1890 Sidney fair spent most of their money to hire the Oakland Band.

She explained that in the absence of television and Walkmans (never mind smartphones), “To hear the band playing as you strolled around the fair grounds, or went into the hall and sat down to take a break was a treat.”

There were also dances some afternoons – “Anyone who wished to dance paid for one dance at a time.” In 1890, the fair was not lighted, so there was no evening music or dancing.

Hammond’s history included reproductions of two posters.

One advertised a Feb. 5, 1892, exhibition of “The marvels of the modern phonograph,” which would “Talk, Laugh, Sing, Whistle, Play on all sorts Instruments including Full Brass Band.” After Professor R. B. Capen, of Augusta, finished his demonstration, there would be a Grand Ball, with music by Dennis’ Orchestra, Augusta, for dancing until 2 a.m.

The second poster announced an Aug. 15, 1898, Grand Concert by the Sidney Minstrels. The program included vocal and instrumental (guitar, banjo and tamborine solos); it was followed by a “social dance” with music by Crowell’s Orchestra.

John Philip Sousa’s inaugural playing of The Stars and Stripes Forever, in Augusta

John Philip Sousa

An on-line site called Military Music says John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever was played for the very first time by Sousa’s Band in the new (opened in 1896) city hall, in Augusta, Maine, on May 1, 1897. Because at that time the march had no title, some historians inaccurately date the first performance to a May 14 concert in Philadelphia.

Contributor Jack Kop­stein wrote that Sousa composed the march as he was returning from Europe late in 1896. His original version called for “Piccolo in D-flat, Two Oboes, Two Bassoons, Clarinet in E-flat, Two Clarinets in B-flat (1-2), Alto saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Three Cornets (1-3), 4 Horns in E-flat (1-4), Three Trombones (1-3), Euphonium, Tuba, Percussion.”

Augusta’s Museum in the Streets (on line) says by May 1, 1897, Sousa’s Band was “the most famous in the land,” and Sousa was “America’s ‘March King.'” The afternoon concert presented some of his earlier compositions; “Sousa’s band enthralled the Augusta audience with spirited music, and his first encore was a new untitled march” – the one that became The Stars and Stripes Forever.

On-line sites give different versions of the words for the march. The one attributed to Sousa begins, “Let martial note in triumph float / And liberty extend its mighty hand….”

Your writer’s personal favorite begins “Be kind to your web-footed friends / For a duck may be somebody’s mother.” (The web attributes these words to radio comedian Fred Allen [1894-1956].)

Augusta’s 1896 city hall was designed by John Calvin Spofford (Nov. 25, 1854 – Aug. 19, 1936), a Maine-born, Boston-based architect well-known for designing public buildings in New England. In addition to municipal offices, the building included a city auditorium.

Kopstein, writing in 2011, said the building served its municipal function until 1987; it then became an assisted living facility. An on-line description of the Inn at City Hall says it now has “31 apartments with its historic decor preserved throughout the complex.”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the Kennebec Valley – Part 2

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This photo was generated by AI as a representation of dancing in the 1800s.

by Mary Grow

Composers, dancing

In his Music and Musicians of Maine, George Thornton Edwards’ list of “principal musical centers in Maine” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries included the Augusta-Hallowell-Gardiner complex, China and “some of the towns in the Kennebec Valley,” in addition to Portland and other, mostly coastal or more southern, towns.

One name frequently mentioned in Maine music histories is composer and hymnologist Japheth Coombs Washburn (Jan. 20, 1780 – Aug. 22 or Aug. 29, 1850), of China Village.

The China bicentennial history says he came to China with his father in 1804, when the north part of the town was still Albion (then Fairfax).

In 1804, Washburn opened the first store in what is now China Village; he opened the first tavern there about 1812. It was he, as a member of the Massachusetts legislature in early 1818, who chose the name “China” – the title of a hymn he liked — for the new town, after “Bloomville” was opposed by the representative from Bloomfield (now part of Skowhegan) as likely to cause misdelivered mail.

When China Village got its first post office in June 1818, it was in Washburn’s store, and he was the first postmaster. He was the first town clerk, serving from 1818 through 1821 and again from 1830 through 1836.

Linda Davenport wrote in her 1996 book Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier that Washburn was a justice of the peace early in the 19th century. He published the town’s first weekly newspaper, the Orb, from Dec. 5, 1833, through November 1836. After China Academy was founded in 1818, Washburn was a member of its second board of trustees starting in 1819.

Washburn married twice, fathered 10 children and founded a family famous for public service in China. Being town clerk was a specialty. Japheth’s oldest son, Oliver Wendell Washburn (Oct. 17, 1804 – Sept. 18, 1885), was clerk from 1840 through 1850; his oldest son, Willis Wendell (March 18, 1856 – June 22, 1942), from 1872 through 1877 and from 1888 until his death. Willis Wendell was succeeded in July 1842 by the youngest of his six children, Mary Alida Washburn ((July 25, 1893 – July 5, 1971), who served through 1970.

The China bicentennial history says nothing about Washburn and music. But Frances Turgeon Wiggin, in her Maine Composers and Their Music, credited him with two collections of hymns and similar music: Parish Harmony, published in 1813, and Temple Harmony, published in 1818. Davenport added collaboration with an older Maine composer, Abraham Maxim (Jan. 3, 1773 – March 28, 1829) of Turner, on the 1816 edition of Maxim’s collection, titled Northern Harmony.

Edwards provided a longer title for Washburn’s 1813 collection: The Parish Harmony or Fairfax Collection of Sacred Music. It was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, he said, and described (he appeared to be quoting from the introduction) as including “a concise introduction to the grounds of music” and numerous “tunes” suitable for worship services.

Temple Harmony, Edwards wrote, was co-published by Washburn and Hallowell publisher E. Goodale.

Davenport’s book includes a 14-page chapter on Maxim and a 24-page chapter on Washburn’s life and music. She described Washburn as a composer of dozens of pieces of sacred music, as well as a compiler of other people’s music.

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Wiggin listed one other 19th-century composer from the central Kennebec Valley, Emily Peace Meader (Feb. 5, 1858 – Sept. 4, 1914). Known as Peace to some of her friends, she was a Waterville native and the only female graduate in Colby College’s Class of 1878.

Her parents were Edward Gove Meader, originally from New Hampshire, and Helen A. (Smith) Meader, of Anson or North Anson, Maine. She had an older and a young brother and a younger sister. There is no record that she married.

Nor are there many records, period. The closest to an account of her role in music history is a few lines in Wiggin’s Maine Composers.

Wiggin described her as a pianist and an accompanist who studied with organist, choir director and composer Homer Norris (Oct. 4, 1860 – Aug. 14, 1920), born in Wayne. Norris, in turn, Wiggin called “One of our earliest composers of importance to follow the French school of music.”

Wiggin included titles of three of Meader’s songs, from a collection published in 1918, and noted that “Miss Meader wrote her own texts.”

Meader was a cousin of Elizabeth Gorham Hoag, one of the four Colby women who founded Sigma Kappa sorority, and was in the sorority’s first group of initiates on Feb. 17, 1875. Wikipedia says Meader composed most of the original music used during the ceremony. A Colby presentation found on line gives her two short paragraphs, including a note that the college has “copies of her sheet music.”

Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville centennial history mentions Meader once, in a list of businessman Edward Meader’s four children; it says nothing about her as a musician. Edwards named her among lesser Maine composers in his chapter on the period between 1857 and 1896.

Edwards included in a list of post-Civil War composers Nathaniel Butler, of Waterville, born in 1824. Whittemore’s history introduces two men of that name, father and son. Franklin W. Johnson’s chapter on Waterville Academy says the senior Nathaniel Butler was that school’s principal for one year, starting in late 1842. Various sources say the junior, son of Rev. Nathaniel and Jeanne Emery Butler, was born in Eastport in May 1853 and was president of Colby College from 1895 to June 1901.

Given the 1824 birth date, the Waterville composer must have been the Rev. Butler, if he was either of these two men. Could he have been Waterville Academy principal in 1842? Conceivably; other educated 18-year-olds assumed similar responsibilities.

Was he the Rev. Nathaniel Butler from Eastport who was a member of the Yarmouth Baptist Church sometime before 1855? Who came from Camden to fill in at the Baptist Church in Ellsworth in December 1866 and January 1867? Who was chaplain of the Maine Senate in 1881-82?

The relevant point for this essay is that none of the references providing these possibilities say anything about their Nathaniel Butler having musical ability or interest.

Edwards also wrote that Maine composer George W. Marston (May 23, 1840 – Feb. 2, 1901), who spent much of his life in Portland where he composed songs and taught “piano, organ and harmony,” “taught piano and played the organ at the First Baptist Church” in Waterville for a year right after he finished high school.

The China bicentennial history adds one more minor association between music and education (otherwise, the book says nothing of significance about music). In 1872, the history says, students at China Academy, in China Village, could sign up for 20 music lessons for $10. For comparison, the fee for “common English” for the 10-week term was $3.50, for “higher English” $4.50 and for “languages or bookkeeping” $5.50.

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Several local histories include references to dancing, which implies music. James North, in his history of Augusta, gave an example from 1788.

That was the year surveyor Ephraim Ballard rebuilt his sawmill on Bond’s Brook that had burned in August 1787. The mill-raising was July 7; after the day’s work, North wrote, “the young folks…had a dance” at Ballard’s that lasted until midnight.

Years later, in 1838, North described resolutions approved by Augusta’s conservative East Parish Unitarians “on the subject of ‘public balls and the amusement of dancing,’ in which the inconsistency of professing Christians in attending the former was declared and their duty to refrain from the latter asserted.”

Not all church members complied, North said. In 1840, a committee reiterated the resolutions; after discussion, church members endorsed them on a 25-1 vote and had them printed and distributed in February. Disobedience continued, leading to arguments about the church’s right to discipline its members and in the summer of 1840 the withdrawal of “the offending members.”

In his chapter of recollections from the 1820s through 1850s in Whittemore’s Waterville history, William Mathews mentioned a “dancing-hall” in one of the town’s three hotels. There and elsewhere in town, “Tea parties, dance parties, and balls were frequent,” he wrote.

In the same history, novelist Martha Baker Dunn contributed a chapter on social life in Waterville. She, too, talked about dancing parties, in private homes and public spaces.

In his history of Windsor, Linwood Lowden named common 19th-century social activities. Some were work-related, like husking bees and sewing bees. He also listed horse trots, turkey shoots, croquet parties, community picnics and Sunday afternoon rides in a horse-drawn buggy.

“Community dances were especially popular. These were held in barns, in mills, in halls, and in private homes,” Lowden wrote.

A dance was a common finale to a community event like “an all day picnic,” he added. His discussion was without dates, but the context suggests he was talking about the second half of the 19th century.

And remember teen-ager Orren Choate, who celebrated Independence Day in 1885 by going from his Windsor home to a dance in Weeks Mills and didn’t get home until midnight (see the June 29 issue of The Town Line)?

It seems to have been Choate’s diary that gave Lowden his description of the Grand Army of the Republic’s fair at the end of September 1885. Events included a Wednesday performance by the Hallowell Cornet Band and a Friday evening dance.

On Christmas Day, 1885, young Choate decided against going to a dance in South Windsor because the weather was too cold. Lowden added that the dance “would have been held in Wingate Hall – now [1993] Shirley Varney’s apartments.”

What kind(s) of dance music and whether it was provided by a solitary fiddler or half a dozen people playing varied instruments – local historians provided only occasional sketchy information.

For example, Mathews wrote that summer vacations were not common in the1820s and 1830s, but occasionally a group of Waterville residents would go by boat to the mouth of the Kennebec for a week’s recreation. “Usually they took a fiddler with them,” he wrote, to accompany them in whatever dance was popular at the time.

Lowden described an expedition from Windsor in July 1886, quoting from Choate’s dairy. On Wednesday, July 28, Choate and three friends made a 40-mile, 12-hour journey to Pemaquid (Pemequid, in Choate’s spelling) Point. They stayed until the following Monday morning, hunting, fishing, lobstering and collecting shells; and on Saturday Choate wrote, “There is going to be a dance near our tent tonight.”

Several smaller towns had dance pavilions. Milton E. Dowe’s history of Palermo locates a 19th-century one in the field behind the present Branch Mills Grange Hall; he wrote that “it was demolished about 1900.”

The China bicentennial history says there were three in South China, one probably open in the 1890s and two more early in the 1900s.

Main sources

Davenport, Linda, Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier Maine’s Sacred Tunebooks, 1800-1830 (1996).
Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Edwards, George Thornton, Music and musicians of Maine: being a history of the progress of music in the territory which has come to be known as the State of Maine, from 1604 to 1928 (1970 reprint).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)
Wiggin, Frances Turgeon, Maine Composers and Their Music (1959).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the central Kennebec Valley

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The 1866 Hook organ at the South Parish Congregational Church, in Augusta.

by Mary Grow

After the frustration of finding only scanty and random information from local historians on how central Kennebec Valley residents cared for their destitute neighbors, your writer decided to continue frustrating herself on a more cheerful topic: music.

There were music and musicians in central Maine before the Europeans’ arrival. Music historian George Thornton Edwards provided a bit of information on native American music in his Music and Musicians of Maine.

The early European settlers, too, enjoyed and appreciated music, Edwards wrote. At first it was mostly sacred and mostly vocal.

An 18th century Viol.

The usual accompaniment to a church choir was a bass viol. Portland’s Second Parish Church seems to have been a leader in expanding use of instruments. Edwards wrote that the cornet and clarinet (or clarionet) had supplemented the viol before 1798, when the church acquired the first church organ in the city.

Augusta wasn’t far behind. In 1802, according to Edwards and to James North’s Augusta history, residents of the North Parish raised $35 to buy a bass viol and build a box for it. Stephen Jewett played the viol; Edwards commented that “ultra conservative” residents no doubt disapproved.

North included a reference from 1796, when Hallowell Academy, opened May 5, 1795, celebrated the end of its first year with public student recitations. North quoted from the May 10, 1796, issue of the Tocsin (Hallowell’s second newspaper): the public presentation included “vocal and instrumental music, under the direction of Mr. Belcher the ‘Handel‘ of Maine.”

(“Mr. Belcher” was Supply Belcher [March 29, 1751 – June 9, 1836]. Born in Massachusetts, he fought in the Revolution; moved to Hallowell in 1785; and in 1791 settled in Farmington for the rest of his life. He published in 1794 a collection of his sacred compositions called The Harmony of Maine.)

North borrowed from Edwards’ history a description of another series of musical events that started in early 1822, when a group of musically-inclined South Parish Congregational Church parishioners brought to the town “Mr. Holland,” a professor of music from New Bedford, Massachusetts. (Your writer has failed to find Mr. Holland’s first name or dates.)

Holland began a new method of teaching “psalmody” (the singing of sacred music, especially in church services) and gave piano lessons. His singers joined the church choir, and the ensuing interest led to raising money to buy a $550 British-made organ, the first organ in Augusta. It was installed on Sept. 4, North said.

The next Sunday, “Mrs. Ostinelli,” Sophia Henrietta Emma Hewitt Ostinelli (May 23, 1799 – Aug. 31, 1845), played the organ. She was the daughter of Boston composer, conductor and music publisher James Hewitt, and the new wife of Italian-born violinist and conductor Paul Louis Antonio Ostinelli (1795 – 184?). An on-line source calls her “pianist, organist, singer, and music teacher.”

Edwards wrote that her husband was described as a violinist “without a peer in America at that time.” He was also an orchestra conductor.

On Sept. 19 and again on Sept. 25, Holland directed “an oratorio of sacred music,” held, Linda Davenport wrote in her Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier, at the church. The concerts were benefits, the first for Holland and the second for the Ostinellis.

Music was provided by church members – the church did not seem to have its own “ongoing musical society,” Davenport wrote – plus choir members from Hallowell’s Congregational and Baptist societies. At one of these concerts, maybe both, Ostinelli played violin solos.

Davenport reprinted the program of the Sept. 19 concert. Each of the two parts began with an organ voluntary, followed by vocal music, both chorus and solo. Seven of the 15 pieces performed were by George Frideric Handel; one was by Franz Joseph Haydn.

North wrote the Holland concerts were the last time such “first class concerts” were presented in Augusta until June 1859, when Ostinelli’s daughter Elise, Madame Biscaccianti, sang.

Holland moved back to New Bedford in September 1823, Edwards wrote. “It is said that his influence on the musical life in Augusta is felt to this day (1928).”

The same year Cyril Searle was “temporarily located in Augusta and he continued the excellent work which had been started by Mr. Holland.”

North devoted three pages to Searle – not to his musical career, but to a description of the sketch he did of Augusta, probably in 1823 (definitely after Maine and Massachusetts separated in 1820, and before a building he included burned on Nov. 8, 1823).

When Augusta’s first Unitarian church, called Bethlehem Church, was built in 1827, it had an organ, North wrote. This church, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, was on the east bank of the Kennebec, where the Cony Flatiron Building (formerly Cony High School) stands today. Since most of the Augusta Unitarians lived on the west side of the river, a new church was built only six years later on State Street, about a block north of the present Lithgow Library.

In later descriptions of new church buildings, North occasionally mentioned an organ; apparently by the 1830s, they were common enough not to be worth noting.

An event he described that will remind readers of the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” and in which music played a minor role, occurred in 1832.

By then Maine’s capital had moved to Augusta. The legislature, meeting in secret session, discussed a controversial proposal to cede land to Great Britain to resolve the conflict over the Maine-Canada boundary (a conflict that led to the Aroostook War of 1839 – see the March 17, 2022, issue of The Town Line).

An anonymous source sent information on the secret deliberations to Luther Severance, publisher of an Augusta newspaper, who printed it. Legislators demanded to know the source. Severance refused to answer committee questions and was threatened with a contempt citation, but was apparently never prosecuted.

Enough of Augusta’s elite sympathized with Severance to organize a dinner in his honor, at which speakers denounced legislators, praised the free press and, North quoted from Severance’s newspaper, enjoyed “an excellent dinner, moistened with the best old Madeira, and accompanied by fine music.”

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There were also privately run singing schools, Edwards wrote. Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that schoolhouses were one place singing schools met. He added that by the late 1800s, schoolhouses were also sites for “some rowdy dances with frequent fights.”

Edwards’ history includes names of people, mostly men but some women, who ran singing schools. One was Coker Marble, whose singing school in Vassalboro operated for more than 20 years in the period from 1836 through 1856.

An on-line Marble genealogy provides limited information on not one but two men named Coker Marble. The genealogy starts with Samuel Marble (Oct. 23, 1728 -?) and Sarah Coker (June 21, 1735 -?), who married in 1754 in New Hampshire. They had at least three children: Hannah and John, both born in 1755, and Coker Marble Sr. (Sept. 28, 1765 – Aug. 30, 1823).

Coker Marble Sr., married twice, according to the on-line genealogy. He and his first wife, Polly Mason, whom he married about 1796, had at least one daughter.

On Jan. 1, 1801, in New Hampshire, he married Rhoda Judkins (1776 -1864). The oldest of their six children was Coker Marble Jr. (Feb. 8, 1802 – Sept. 10, 1882), who was born in Vassalboro.

In his chapter on Vassalboro in the Kennebec County history, Kingsbury named Rev. Coker Marble as pastor – presumably the first pastor – of the Second Baptist Church, organized at Cross Hill in 1808 with 37 members but, Kingsbury said, “probably…no church property.” From the dates in the genealogical information, this pastor must have been the senior Coker Marble, who would have been in his mid-40s in 1808.

Grave marker for Elder Coker Marble Sr., left, and his wife, Rhoda, on right., at the Cross Hill Cemetery, in Vassalboro.

Vassalboro cemetery records show that Coker Marble Sr., named as Elder Coker Marble, and Rhoda are buried in Vassalboro’s Cross Hill cemetery, with the two youngest of their four daughters.

(Your writer also found on line a biography of a Massachusetts doctor named John Oliver Marble. The biography specifies that he was the son of John and Emeline [Prescott] Marble and the grandson of Rev. Coker Marble. Dr. Marble was born April 26, 1839, in Vassalboro. He graduated from Colby in 1863 and received his medical degree from Georgetown in 1868.)

Coker Marble Jr., married Marcia Lewis (March 19, 1806 – Dec. 17, 1881) on Aug. 31 or Oct. 20, 1824, in Whitefield. Between 1825 and 1853 Marcia bore seven daughters and three sons. The sons were named Arthur, Edwin and Henry.

From the birth and death dates, your writer concludes that it was Coker Marble Jr., who ran the Vassalboro singing school, probably beginning when he was in his early 30s. The genealogy lists two of his and Marcia’s children as born in Vassalboro, in 1837 and 1841, and two others in Hallowell, in 1839 and 1845.

The on-line site says the younger Coker Marble lived in Pittston in 1870 and Skowhegan in 1880; Marcia is listed in Pittston in 1870 and in Milburn in 1880 (Milburn might then have been part of Skowhegan). Both died in Bath (another site says Coker Marble died in either Bath or China) and are buried in Bath’s Maple Grove Cemetery.

Main sources

Davenport, Linda, Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier Maine’s Sacred Tunebooks, 1800-1830 (1996).
Edwards, George Thornton, Music and musicians of Maine: being a history of the progress of music in the territory which has come to be known as the State of Maine, from 1604 to 1928 (1970 reprint).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W. , The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: How towns cared for their poor (conclusion)

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In many areas, poor families were auctioned off to the lowest bidder.

by Mary Grow

Benton, Clinton, Fairfield, Waterville, Winslow

This fourth and final article on the ways central Kennebec Valley towns carried out their responsibility to care for their poorest residents will provide bits of information about half a dozen towns not already discussed.

* * * * * *

For Benton (which was part of Clinton until March 16, 1842, when it became a new town named Sebasticook, changed to Benton on March 4, 1850), Henry Kingsbury had only one sentence about paupers: “The poor of the town have never been numerous, and are cared for [in 1892] by individual contract.”

In his Kennebec County history, he related an informal example. In the early 1800s, he wrote, a family named Piper proposed moving from Anson, Maine, to Ohio. As they were canoeing down the Kennebec, the canoe upset at Ticonic Falls, in Waterville, and the father drowned.

A second-generation Benton resident named Isaac Spencer rescued the Piper son, Joseph, “snugly wrapped in a blanket,” and brought him to his house. Joseph’s mother also survived, but she could not support her son, so he stayed with Spencer.

Kingsbury wrote that Joseph Piper “became a successful farmer.” He died in the 1850s, leaving a large estate on part of which a grandson named Charles was living in 1892.

* * * * * *

Kingsbury wrote that Clinton’s first poor farm, which existed before Benton and Clinton were separated in 1842, was “about half a mile west of Morrison’s Corner.”

Morrison’s Corner was, and as Morrison Corner still is, the four corners where Hinckley Road, running roughly north to south, meets Battle Ridge Road, which runs northeast to connect to Upper Bellsqueeze Road, and Ferry Road, which runs southwest to the former Noble’s Ferry on the Kennebec River.

By 1879, according to that year’s Kennebec County atlas, Clinton had a new town farm east of the original one, on the east side of Hill Road (which runs north-northwest out of downtown Clinton toward Canaan).

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Crossing back to the west side of the Kennebec, the 1988 Fairfield bicentennial history has no reference to a town farm, poor house or almshouse or any other town-funded method of caring for paupers. The first town meeting after the town was incorporated was on Aug. 19, 1788; the first reference to appropriations says that in 1793 “The Town first raised money for schools,” but lists no amount and mentions no other expenditures.

The history gives a short paragraph to what became the Goodwill-Hinckley School (described in the May 20 and June 3, 2021, issues of The Town Line). Rev. George W. Hinckley founded what started as Good Will Farm in June 1889, in the part of Fairfield now called Hinckley, “as a home for boys.”

In November 1889, the history continues, “the Good Will Home Association was organized as a home for needy boys with funds Rev. Hinckley had been collecting for some time.” The writers go on to describe 20th-century changes.

At the end of the bicentennial history is a reproduction of a 1909 map of Fairfield that shows a building labeled “Town Farm.” It is on the south side of a road running east from Green Road to Nye’s Corner, which is south – downriver, toward the Fairfield business district – of the Goodwill School.

A map from the mid-1980s shows the former road as a trail. It does not appear in any form on a contemporary on-line map.

(According to the 1909 map, the town farm was a short distance east of a four-way intersection where at least two families named Green lived. There was a schoolhouse on the east side of the intersection.)

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Waterville was part of Winslow from 1771 to 1802, and Oakland was part of Waterville until 1873, when it became a separate town called West Waterville (changed to Oakland in 1883).

Kingsbury explained that the growth of water-powered manufacturing on Messalonskee Stream, the outlet of Messalonskee Lake, led to the development of an industrial center separate from Waterville’s, which was based on and near the Kennebec.

Kingsbury’s accounts of poor farms in Winslow, Waterville and Oakland are frustratingly incomplete. As he often did, he assumed future readers would have access to the same documents he had, and would recognize the names of families, roads and localities that were part of his daily experience in the 1890s.

In his chapter on Winslow, he wrote that until 1859, paupers were bid off. That year, “the town voted $3,200, and bought the Blanchard farm.”

If the former Blanchard farm was still the town farm when the 1879 Kennebec County atlas was created, it was in a part of town more settled than officials usually chose for an almshouse.

The map shows the Town Farm on the west side of what is now Clinton Avenue (Route 100) running northeast along the Sebasticook River to Benton. The farm is marked about halfway between the top of the hill in Winslow and the Hayward Road intersection. Along this stretch, the map shows a dozen houses (occupied by, among others, several Getchell and Fuller families and two whose last name was Town) and a schoolhouse diagonally north of the town farm.

Kingsbury was slightly more informative on Waterville (unlike the Waterville centennial history; the summary of the 100 years from 1802 to 1902 doesn’t mention the poor, and since the book has a names-only index, finding any other reference is time-consuming).

In Waterville, Kingsbury found, the poor were bid off from 1811 (or earlier) until about 1842. In 1811, five paupers cost the town from 35 to 65 cents a week, for a weekly total of $2.59. In 1812, the town supported a dozen people and the cost went up to $3.48 a week.

(Ruby Crosby Wiggin’s comments about doctors’ fees, cited in last week’s article, suggest there might have been occasional additional charges.)

From 1837 records Kingsbury quoted a decision that the poor as a group “be sold at auction for one year.” Samuel H. Batchelder was the successful bidder, charging $865.

Around 1842, Waterville officials bought from Joseph Mitchell and George Bessey a 90-acre farm to use as a town farm. At an unspecified later date, the town also acquired a woodlot in Sidney, apparently intended to complement the farm.

The 1879 Kennebec County map shows Waterville’s town farm a short distance south of downtown, on the south side of Webb Road. It was just west of the intersection with Mitchell Road, which current maps show coming south from the back of LaFleur Airport to Webb Road.

In March 1890 the house on the town farm burned down. Officials then bought seven acres from George Boutelle and “built the present excellent city alms house at a total expense at $6,444.”

(George Keely Boutelle was a prominent Waterville lawyer and businessman who helped organize and lead several banks and was active in civic organizations.)

By 1892, Waterville’s “poor department” was costing more than $9,000 a year, Kingsbury added.

The 1873 separation of West Waterville (which became Oakland) from Waterville would have required the new town to assume the care of its indigent residents. The 1879 map of the new town shows a town farm not far west of downtown, on the north side of what is now High Street (Route 137 heading west toward Smithfield). Comparison with a contemporary on-line map puts the farm site about half-way between the Oak Street intersection and the Gage Road intersection.

Kingsbury provided evidence that in the early 1890s Oakland was both running a town farm and caring for paupers off the farm. Appropriations listed in a town report for the fiscal year that ended Feb. 28, 1892, included “support of poor,” $1,100 and “town farm,” $500.

A current on-line map labels the road along the east shore of McGrath Pond that connects Route 137 with Route 11 (the Oakland-Belgrade road) as Town Farm Road. A town farm on this road, if there were one, would have been west of the one in use in 1879.

Story of the Bray sisters

Did local methods of caring for the poor lead to those who were bid off to local families being turned into unpaid and mistreated farm and household help? Linwood Lowden said “without doubt” the system led to abuses; an on-line source says there is no evidence of abuse.

Your writer found one piece of writing that looks at bidding out from the paupers’ viewpoint: a short story by Sarah Orne Jewett called The Town Poor.

Two prosperous women in a small Maine town detour on their way home from a church event to visit two elderly sisters, Ann and Mandana Bray, who ran out of money and saw their house and possessions sold at auction and themselves bid out.

They live in a dingy upstairs room in a shabby farmhouse on a run-down farm. The couple with whom they live, named Janes, are not their social equals, and the complaining wife is not enthusiastic about sharing her house with two more adults. The sisters admit to their friends that they haven’t been to meeting because they lack outdoor shoes that their caretakers never remember to buy for them, nor do they have enough stovewood to keep their room warm.

But they bring out the four china teacups saved from the auction, the last of the homemade peach jam from the peaches that grew by their former house, tea and cheese and crackers. The friends have a warm reunion; and Ann says next time, she’ll invite Mrs. Janes, too; the woman means well and deserves cheering up, because she has a hard life and none of the happy memories the Bray sisters have.

See part 1 here.
See part 2 here.
See part 3 here.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Halfpenny, H. E., Atlas of Kennebec County Maine 1879 (1879).
Jewett, Sarah Orne, A White Heron and Other Stories (1999 edition).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Free community college extended two more years

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photo: Janet Mills, Facebook

Governor Mills signs budget funding free college scholarships for high school classes of 2024-25

Tuition-free community college in Maine was extended to two more graduating high school classes under the budget passed by the legislature and signed on July 11 by Governor Janet Mills.

The $15 million investment will allow students graduating from high school or its equivalent in 2024 and 2025 to attend any Maine community college without paying any tuition or mandatory fees – a value of more than $3,800 a year.

“Extending Free College to the classes of 2024 and 2025 tells today’s high school students that the State of Maine believes in them and is willing to invest in them and their future,” said Maine Community College System (MCCS) President David Daigler.

“The scholarship means they won’t have to work multiple jobs while they study or take just one or two classes at a time because they can’t afford more. They’ll have time to focus on learning a trade or becoming a nurse or a police officer or a chef, or pursuing any of the hundreds of degrees or one-year certificates we offer. And they’ll graduate as the kind of skilled workers Maine desperately needs right now and for years into the future. It’s a bold move that benefits workers, employers, and the entire state of Maine,” Daigler said.

Following a proposal from Governor Mills, Maine launched the Free Community College program in April 2022 with a one-time state investment of $20 million, benefiting the pandemic-era high school graduates from 2020-2023. In the first year, 6,400 students attended community college tuition-free.

Earlier this year, some students told lawmakers what a difference the program made for them. Maya Eichorn, now a top student at York County Community College, said she wasn’t even considering college.

“One year ago … I was dropping out (of high school) to take the HiSET exam,” she said. “Today, I am a full-time college student with a 4.0. Without the Maine Free College program, I would be aimlessly moving through life.”

Tuition-free education at Maine’s community colleges is also available to current high school students through OnCourse, an early college program, and for anyone enrolled in most short-term workforce training programs. More information about the Free College Scholarship is available here.

Annual 11-hour continuous soccer returns

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Photo credit: Shine on Cass/Kick for Cass

Over 500 players, including 17 high school soccer teams from around the state, will join the 11-hour, continuous soccer game “Kick For Cass” on Saturday, July 15, at Thomas College, in Waterville. The annual event is held in memory of Cassidy Charette, a former midfielder for Messalonskee High School girls soccer, who wore the #11 jersey, before her passing in a tragic hayride accident on October 11, 2014.

Kick For Cass will welcome back high school soccer teams, playing from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., in a round-robin play day. From 3 to 7 p.m., community teams of club soccer, adult leagues, local organizations, Cassidy’s friends and neighbors, and her former soccer teammates will round out the final hours.

The final hour of Kick for Cass will have a walk-in ceremony and a friendly competition between Cassidy’s former soccer teammates from Messalonskee High School vs. her Central Maine United Premiere Soccer team, from 6 to 7 p.m. Spectators are welcome all day. Messalonskee All Sports Boosters Club will provide concessions throughout the event. Inclement weather date is Sunday, July 16. For more information, email shineoncass@gmail.com or visit shineoncass.org.

BHB&T donates to numerous nonprofit organizations

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Bar Harbor Bank & Trust employees recently presented more than $19,000 in donations collected through the bank’s employee-driven charitable giving program, Casual for a Cause, to nine nonprofit organizations serving Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont residents. The recipients of the donations are: Eastern Maine Community College Foundation, Kennebec Valley Community College Foundation, Lubec Community Outreach Center, Machias Area Food Pantry, and Schoodic Food Pantry in Maine; Dismas Home of New Hampshire and The River Center in New Hampshire; and BarnArts Center for the Arts and Village for Paws Rescue in Vermont.

Employees participating in Casual for a Cause dress casually on Fridays in exchange for a bi-weekly payroll deduction made to a pool of funds collected during each quarter. The employees then vote on which nonprofits will receive their contributions. Employees have donated more than $220,000 since the program begin in 2018.

“We often say that our employees are passionate about the communities where we live and work, and Casual for a Cause is a testament to that,” said Jack Frost, VP Director of Community Giving at Bar Harbor Bank & Trust. “The employees participating in the program give from their own pockets to support our neighbors and create better communities, and we are always amazed by their generosity.”

Local recipients of Q1 2023 donations include:

Kennebec Valley Community College (KVCC) Foundation invests in students, faculty, and programs to empower individuals and to build stronger communities. The nonprofit organization raises funds to promote and support all educational programs; provides state-of-the-art equipment and facilities; and ensures access through scholarship funds for students. Learn more about KVCC Foundation at www.kvcc.me.edu.

EVENTS: Summer scouting programs available

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Summer programs will be active and enriching for youth attending area scout camps and scout activities according to two leaders of these programs. Brittany St. Amand, of Pittston, and Shelley Connolly, of Pittsfield, have spent months organizing and getting things ready for outstanding summer programs.

Brittany St. Amand will be the Cub Scout Day Camp Director at Camp Gustin, in Sabattus, and Camp Hinds, in Raymond, this summer. She is also the Webelo Leader in Gardiner Cub Pack #672.

Cub Scout Day Camps, with the “Off to the Races” theme, will be run July 17-21, at Camp Gustin, July 24-28, at Camp Bomazeen, in Belgrade, led by Julie McKenney, of Belgrade, and August 7-11, at Camp Hinds.

At Cub Scout Day Camp, leaders provide adventures and an opportunity for your Cub Scout (or Cub Scout-aged youth) to enjoy Cub Scout activities in a day camp style setting. Cub Scouts earn requirements for rank advancement, special awards and gain recognition. Cub Day Camp is for youth in first through fifth grade. Youth entering first grade in the fall are welcome at camp, however an adult/parent needs to accompany them. And, Cub Scout Packs can register and attend Cub Scout Day Camp as a group. Day Camp, which runs Monday through Friday from 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., is often a youth’s first major experience in scouting with their peers, under the guidance of trained and caring adult volunteer leaders. If you can attend with your child as a leader (a member of our racing pit crew), you will receive $100 off the cost of camp for their child. For more information on volunteering at camp, email Leah Barry at leahbarry@ptcbsa.org.

Preparing for camp takes months of organization and they must follow all State of Maine and Scouting requirements to operate.

In addition to these programs, Pine Tree Council also offers Family FunPack Weekend on July 29-30 at Camp Bomazeen; Webelos Resident Camp at Camp Hinds July 30 – August 2; and Scout camp at Camp Hinds runs through the month of July including hiking, swimming, boating, rock climbing, Scoutcraft and STEM and older scouts can challenge themselves with Project COPE (Challenging Outdoor Personal Experience).

Those who have questions about these programs can contact Brittany at B.STAMANDSCOUTS@GMAIL.COM; Shelley at bsatroop428 maine@ gmail.com or if you have questions about any of the summer activities, contact Leah at Pine Tree Council If you have questions or need help, contact Leah at leahbarry@ptcbsa.org (207) 517-6196.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Taking care of paupers

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Bidding out was done at town meetings, where officials and voters discussed each needy person or family publicly by name. Residents bid for a poor person, asking a specific sum from the town for a year’s room, board and care, in the pauper’s home or the bidder’s home.

by Mary Grow

The earliest settlers in the Kennebec Valley, as elsewhere in New England, were for the most part able-bodied and self-supporting. But within a generation or two, a settlement would be likely to have residents who were unable to support themselves.

Some might be physically or mentally disabled. Older people might lose their ability to do manual labor and outlive their resources. Children might be left without a caring family.

A bad economy might send people into poverty. Different historians mention the near-destruction of export-dependent businesses (lumbering, for example) and the dramatic increase in prices of food and other necessities caused by the embargo during the War of 1812. Bad weather was another factor; farmers lost crops and income in 1816, the Year without a Summer.

Whatever the cause, if someone was a pauper and had no supportive relatives, caring for the poor was a town responsibility, as evidenced by the expression “going on the town” – becoming dependent on local taxpayers for the means of existence.

An on-line source says going on the town was a last resort and a humiliation. The writer gave three reasons: paupers lost the right to vote or to hold office; town officials might have authority to sell paupers’ property to fund their care; and townspeople looked down on those whom their taxes supported.

Maine towns had at least two ways of caring for their poor. One system was called “outdoor relief:” paupers were either supported financially on their own properties, or bid out to live with more prosperous neighbors.

Bidding out was done at town meetings, where officials and voters discussed each needy person or family publicly by name. Residents bid for a poor person, asking a specific sum from the town for a year’s room, board and care, in the pauper’s home or the bidder’s home.

An alternative was for voters to leave placement decisions to town officials. Officials for this purpose were the selectmen, whose titles included, and in many Maine towns still include, overseers of the poor.

The other option for a town was to buy a piece of property for a town poor house or poor farm, where paupers would be housed and cared for. “Farm” was almost always literal; the residents helped raise crops and tend livestock.

In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond listed another method a person or family who owned property but was facing insolvency could use: the property could be deeded over to the town, on condition that the town would care for the donor(s) for life. Hammond mentioned real estate records showing Sidney had thus become owners of several farms that town officials later sold.

Town officials were careful not to spend their residents’ tax money on other towns’ paupers. Local histories occasionally mention lawsuits between towns to settle which is responsible for a person or family.

The following paragraphs will offer more specific information on how municipalities in the Central Kennebec Valley area took care of their poor before the present era of homeless shelters and homeless encampments.

This topic is one for which your writer’s self-imposed restriction to secondary sources available in books or on line (you’ll remember that this history series started early in the pandemic, when visiting town offices was discouraged) is limiting. Not all towns’ records are available on line, and some town historians wrote nothing about paupers. Others, however, provided enough information to intrigue your writer and, she hopes, her readers.

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At Augusta’s first town meeting, on April 3, 1797 (after Augusta separated from Hallowell in February 1797 and briefly became Harrington), Kingsbury reported that voters approved spending $1,250 for roads, $400 for roads and $300 for everything else, including supporting the poor.

The first poor house was approved at a March 11, 1805, meeting, according to Kingsbury and to James North’s Augusta history. Selectmen were not to spend more than $300. Voters at the annual meeting in 1806 elected George Reed or Read as its first superintendent.

Kingsbury described the location by 19th-century landmarks: north of Ballard’s corner (probably the current intersection of Bond and Water streets), and just south of the Curtis residence in 1805, and in 1892 marked by a “well on the east side of the road and an old sweet apple tree.”

By 1810, according to North, municipal spending had increased in the three categories Kingsbury listed in 1897: the appropriation for roads was $1,500, “payable in labor”; for schools, $1,000, and for everything else (both historians lump the poor “and other necessary charges”), another $1,500.

In 1833, North wrote, Augusta voters authorized selectmen to decide how to care for paupers. Neither he nor Kingsbury explained why there was evidently dissatisfaction with the poor house.

A special meeting in January 1834 made the authorization more specific: after the current contract with David Wilbur (the poor house superintendent?)) expired, town officials were to consider whether to buy a farm, contract or think up “some other mode.”

The five-man committee created to carry out this instruction reported at an April 21 meeting that while the legislature was in session they had talked with people from other parts of Maine and found unanimous support for “thePoor House system, both as regards economy and comfort and the prevention of pauperism.”

This committee recommended a second committee be appointed to look for “a suitable piece of land.” Charles Williams, from the first committee, and four new members of the second committee agreed with the first in advising that the farm be “near the village”; they recommended a third committee to buy a suitable property.

This third committee, which consisted of John Potter from the second committee and four more newcomers, reported to a Sept. 9 town meeting an agreement to buy Church Williams’ farm for $3,000. Their action was approved and yet another committee, chaired by Potter, appointed to build a house on the property.

The building went up by the end of 1834, North wrote. By 1870, he said, it had been “enlarged from time to time to the dimensions of the present commodious and convenient almshouse.”

A century after the building was finished, an on-line report on the Depression-era New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s work relief project describes repairs planned in 1934 and done in 1935. The writer said they were much needed: “Very few people realized the condition of this building and the unsanitary conditions and the inmates were living in.”

By then the building consisted of four floors over a large basement, “all of which were deteriorating rapidly.” Early steps were to reinforce a ceiling and put a partial new foundation “to keep the kitchen and range from falling into the basement.”

“The entire building was so infested with cockroaches and bedbugs that a special machine had to be hired along with an operator to exterminate these insects. All beds and bedding including blankets, mattresses, pillows and sheets were destroyed and replaced.”

Interior walls were replastered or repapered or painted; plumbing and heating systems were totally updated; the building was completely rewired; all the stairways were replaced, as were 20 doors and about 75 windows. A laundry was added and equipped, and a shed converted to a well-stocked store from which “the town truck delivers food daily to the city’s poor.”

The work crew consisted of 21 men. Total cost in labor, supplied by the ERA, was almost $5,400; the City of Augusta provided about $5,000 worth of materials. Work began Jan. 24 and was finished June 6, 1935.

The undated on-line site adds that the building had since been demolished and the Augusta public works department had moved onto the property.

* * * * * *

In Sidney, immediately north of Augusta on the west side of the Kennebec River, historian Hammond wrote, in the context of official town business in the 1790s, that “A problem right from the beginning was how to provide for the poor in town.”

She found an (undated) record of an early incident: the town constable “was ordered to serve notice on at least 25 families [presumably poor families] who had moved into town without first seeking permission.”

Town clerk’s records show that the constable carried out his orders, but, Hammond said, there is no proof the families were equally obedient; instead, some were still in Sidney years afterwards.

In addition to bidding out paupers, Hammond found Sidney town meeting voters repeatedly appointed a committee to buy a poor house or poor farm – and at the next meeting rejected the committee’s recommendation.

In 1867, she wrote, “the town actually purchased a working farm, hired a superintendent and moved paupers to the house.”

This poor farm was on 100 acres where Town Farm Road runs west off River Road (now West River Road) to Middle Road, in the north end of Sidney. The 1879 Kennebec County atlas shows the farm in the northwest corner of the three-way intersection; some of the land, then or later, was on the east side of West River Road (see below).

In 1869, Hammond wrote, voters directed selectmen to lay out and fence a cemetery on the town farm.

The 1877 town meeting warrant included an article Hammond quoted: “To see if town will vote to build suitable places at the poor house on the farm so as to be able to control the unruly poor.”

She also quoted the voters’ decision: “That it be left with the overseers to put them on bread and water if they see fit.” (Note the plural “overseers,” – by 1877, taxpayers were paying more than a single superintendent to staff the farm.)

This farm was a working farm, as Hammond’s information from what she called a typical inventory in the February 1895 annual report showed. The farm then had 28 hens; a dozen sheep; four cows and two yearlings; and two pigs. There were stockpiles of hay, straw, potatoes, turnips, oats, beans and beets.

The inventory further listed ham, pork, flour and butter; vinegar, pickles, molasses, spice and salt; and 80 gallons of cider and one pound each of tea and coffee.

Town officials and voters continued to debate whether the farm was the best arrangement, Hammond wrote. They agreed to lease it to different people, and eventually closed and sold it in 1919 to Mrs. Clara Wilshire for $3,000.

Hammond wrote that the sale did not include “the gravel bank on the east side of the River Road.” J. J. Pelotte later bought that parcel for $1,000. (Sidney’s 2003 comprehensive plan, found on line at the University of Maine Digital Commons site, lists the J. J. Pelotte gravel pit.)

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

EVENTS: National Poppy Day is May 26, 2023

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May 26, 2023 is National Poppy Day. Members of American Legion Auxiliary (ALA) Unit #39, Madison, will be distributing bright red poppies in exchange for a donation throughout the month of May. The Flanders Fields poppy has become an internationally known and recognized symbol of the lives sacrificed in war and the hope that none died in vain. The American Legion Family called upon Congress to proclaim the Friday before Memorial Day as National Poppy Day, which was officially designated as such in 2017.

Honor our fallen warriors and contribute to the continuing needs of our veterans on National Poppy Day, May 27, 2022

“Wearing the poppy on National Poppy Day and throughout Memorial Day weekend is one small way to honor and remember our fallen warriors who willingly served our nation and made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom,” said American Legion Auxiliary (ALA) Unit #39 President Karen Lytle “We must never forget.”

The poppy also honors hospitalized and disabled veterans who handcraft many of the red, crepe paper flowers. Making the poppies provides a financial and therapeutic benefit to the veterans, as well as a benefit to thousands of other veterans.

When The American Legion Family adopted the poppy as its memorial flower in the early 1920s, the blood-red icon became an enduring symbol of honor for the sacrifices of our veterans from the battlefields of France in World War I to today’s global war on terror. The American Legion Auxiliary raises about $4 million each year distributing poppies throughout the nation, with 100 percent of the funds raised going directly to help veterans, military, and their families.

The American Legion Auxiliary (ALA) is a community of volunteers serving veterans, military, and their families. Our members also support the mission of The American Legion in improving the quality of life for our nation’s veterans. The more than 600,000 ALA members across the country volunteer millions of hours annually and raise millions of dollars in service to veterans, military, and their families. Founded in 1919, the ALA is one of the oldest patriotic membership organizations in the U.S.A. To learn more and to volunteer, join, and donate, visit www.ALAforVeterans.org or if you like to join a local unit, contact Robin Turek, President, American Legion Auxiliary, Tardiff-Belanger Unit #39, PO Box 325, Madison, ME 04950.