by Mary Grow

As a break from trying to figure out which schoolhouse was in which end of town, your writer decided to profile some of the people mentioned in last week’s article about Palermo schools, starting with a sampling of the town’s first residents.

The result is the following tantalizing tangle of contradictions and unanswered questions.

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Milton Dowe, in his 1954 Palermo history, identified Stephen Belden, Sr., as the first settler, around 1778, and his son, Stephen, Jr., born in 1779, and daughter, Sally, born in 1780, as the first male and female children born in what became Palermo

Millard Howard, in his 2015 history, cited the “legend” Dowe repeated, including the 1778 approximate date. This “legend,” from an earlier history, says Belden came on horseback with a Bible under his arm.

But, Howard said, more likely Belden arrived in 1769, with his wife, Abigail (Godfrey) Belden and son Aaron. The couple had a second son, Stephen, Jr. (Howard calls him the first white child born in Palermo, in 1770) and four daughters.

The Find a Grave website says the Stephen Belden who settled in Palermo was born Feb. 14, 1745, in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, and died in Palermo June 15, 1822. Abigail was born in 1751 and died in 1820.

WikiTree offers significantly different information. This source lists Abigail as Abigail (Ramsdell) Belding, mother, rather than wife, of the Stephen Belding, or Belden or Beldon, born May 14, 1745, in Northfield in Hampshire Province, Massachusetts.

Wikitree says the 1745 Stephen who came to Palermo had two wives, Mary Mitchell (no information but the name) and Priscilla Oliver (born around 1745), whom he married May 19, 1768, in Georgetown. Priscilla bore him four children: Stephen V (implying the 1745 Stephen was Stephen IV, not Stephen, Sr.), Aaron, Priscilla and Abigail.

Wikitree says Stephen V (aka Stephen, Jr.) was born in 1769 in Lincoln, Massachusetts (perhaps Lincoln County in the Province of Maine, which then included Palermo?). Aaron was born in Lincoln on Feb. 23, 1770 (instead of before 1769). Priscilla was born about 1785 in Fairfax (Maine? but Albion did not become Fairfax until 1804); a note on the website says her information might not be correct. Abigail was born May 27, 1786, in Gardiner.

FamilySearch adds to WikiTree’s list three more Belden daughters: Sarah, born in 1775; Betsey, born April 4, 1776; and Susannah, born May 27, 1785, in Gardiner. This site agrees Priscilla was born in 1785 (no month or day listed), allegedly in Albion. Stephen IV, age 40, and Priscilla, age 34, are named as the parents of Priscilla and Susannah. (Twins plus wrong information would be one explanation.)

Howard said Betsy married surveyor Paul Chadwick, shot by an irate resident on Sept. 8, 1809, as he tried to survey for the Kennebec Proprietors during the so-called Malta War (see the March 7, 2024, issue of The Town Line). FamilySearch says her husband was Lot Chadwick, whom she married in Vassalboro Sept. 25, 1795, and by whom she had at least five sons and three daughters.

Howard wrote that Stephen, Sr., did not choose his Palermo homestead on the shore of Sheepscot Great Pond, as many others did, perhaps because he was a squatter and didn’t want the Kennebec Proprietors’ agents to find him. Instead, he built a log cabin “where Robert and Susie Potter raised their family in the later twentieth century.”

In 1794, Howard said, he relocated to near Belden Pond, in the eastern part of town. Aaron lived nearby for a while after his father moved; he moved again within Palermo in 1801 and in 1816 went to Ohio and became a minister.

Howard wrote that Stephen Belden – probably Stephen, Jr. or V, not first settler Stephen born in 1745 – was a private in Captain Moses Burleigh’s militia company, which spent a week in Belfast in September, 1814, in case the British attacked. There was no attack, but, Howard wrote, by making the march the man qualified as “veterans of the War of 1812.”

In 1835, Stephen, Jr., was on the District 6 school building committee; in 1847, that district’s school enrollment included 10 young Beldens, children of James, John and Stephen, Jr. (Were James and John Stephen, Jr.’s otherwise-unmentioned brothers? Or cousins?)

Enough other Beldens stayed in the area so that Howard wrote many 21st-century Palermo residents could trace their families back to Stephen and Abigail.

Palermo officials established the town’s first two cemeteries, Greeley’s Corner and Dennis Hill, in 1807, Howard said. By 1904, he said, the Dennis Hill cemetery was so badly maintained that a centennial speaker named D. W. Abbott complained, and reminded his audience that Stephen Belden was buried there, “in an unmarked grave.”

Embarrassed listeners promptly raised $100 and pledged another $100 for improvements.

Find a Grave lists two Beldens in Palermo’s Dennis Hill cemetery: Stephen, Sr. (Feb. 14, 1745 – June 15, 1822) and Abigail (Godfrey) (1751 – 1820). The website has photos of Stephen and Abigail’s gravestones.

And Priscilla?

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John Cain, listed by Dowe as an early settler who fathered 18 children, was born Feb. 15, 1764, in Augusta, son of Walter Cain and “Mrs. W. Cain” (FamilySearch); or April 15, 1765 (Find a Grave). On August 10, 1809, in Montville, he married Mary Longfellow, born in Palermo Aug. 10, 1785.

Mary was the daughter of Stephen (1760-1844) and Abigail (Greely) Longfellow (1766 – 1843). The Ancestry website offers Kane as an alternate spelling of her married name.

FamilySearch and Ancestry say Cain was Mary’s second husband. The first was Daniel Keaton (1755 – 1815, per Ancestry, or 1780 -1809, per FamilySearch; which says on a different page that he died “before 1809”).

FamilySearch offers Keaten or Caton as alternative names, the latter from the 1850 census, which said he lived in Augusta. This site says he and Mary were married about 1803 and had at least one daughter (Mary, 1804 – 1878) and one son (Miles, 1807 – 1865).

The Ancestry website lists three of John and Mary Cain’s children, Jacob, Sr. (1809 – 1897); Jonathan L. (1819 – 1897; Jonathan Sam, to FamilySearch); and Martha G. (1826 – 1880)

FamilySearch lists six sons and four daughters, all apparently born in Palermo. The first was Jacob L. Cain, Sr., born Nov. 5, 1809. This birth was less than three months after the wedding; if Daniel Keaton died in, rather than before, 1809, Jacob could have been his son, not John Cain’s.

John and Mary’s last son, FamilySearch says, was Page, born in 1824. Daughter Martha was born in 1826, and the couple’s last child, Eunice L., on Oct. 3, 1828 (when her father was 64 and her mother 43, FamilySearch says).

Your writer found no list with 18 children.

(Then there is the Geni website, which says Daniel Keaton married Mary Keaton-Cain. It lists six stepsons, four with the last name Cain and two Kanes, and four stepdaughters by their married last names. All were born after 1809.)

John Cain died Feb. 13, 1838, and Mary died Feb. 25, 1865, FamilySearch says. Both are buried in Palermo’s Cain Cemetery.

Find a Grave lists 17 Cains buried in this graveyard.

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Another early settler with a large family, according to Dowe, was Amasa Soule, who he said fathered 13 sons and daughters.

Howard said Soule arrived from Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1784, by way of Alna.

The website Geni offers Amasa A. Soule, youngest son of Capt. Ezekiel and Hannah (Delano) Soule. This source says Amasa A. was born “before August 15, 1748” in Duxbury and died in Palermo Aug. 30, 1852 (soon after his 104th birthday). There is no information about a wife or child.

Other websites offer Amasa Soule, born Nov. 2, 1761, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, or Woolwich, Maine, and died Aug. 30, 1852 or 1853, in Palermo.

This Amasa Soule married Susannah (or Susanna, on FamilySearch) Holbrook on Sept. 27 or Oct. 15, 1783, in Wiscasset. Susannah was born Nov. 17, 1759, in Pownal, and died in an unspecified Maine location in 1860.

FamilySearch lists 13 children; Find a Grave lists eight; WikiTree lists four. Here is the grand total:

— Ezekiel, born April 9, 1784, in Palermo (FamilySearch only)
— Daughter Abiah or Abial, born Oct. 8, 1785, in Woolwich (Find a Grave) or Palermo (FamilySearch).
— Joseph, born May 20, 1787, in Woolwich (Find a Grave) or Palermo (FamilySearch).
— Susan, born in 1789, FamilySearch says in Palermo.
— Hannah, born in Palermo March 14, 1791, and died there in November 1871, according to all three sites.
— Lucy, born Oct. 18 or 28, 1794.
— Nancy, Lucy’s twin by birthdate.
— William, born June 25, 1799; WikiTree says he was born in Winslow, Find a Grave says he was born in Palermo (and his wife’s parents were Winslow residents). FamilySearch says he was born in Massachusetts (perhaps confusing Lincoln County, Province of Maine, with Lincoln, Massachusetts).
— Samuel Riley, according to all three sites born Feb. 27, 1800, in Palermo, and died there Aug. 31, 1864.
— Richard (FamilySearch only), born Dec. 31, 1803.
— John (FamilySearch only), born about 1805, FamilySearch says in England, while listing his parents as Amasa and Susanna Soule.
— Eliza, according to WikiTree and FamilySearch, born in Palermo Sept. 28, 1805; or Ezekiel, according to Find a Grave, birth date unknown, died Jan. 5, 1866.

WikiTree says Eliza was born a Soule, on Sept. 28, 1805, and died in 1880. FamilySearch agrees and says she is buried in Palermo’s Smith Cemetery.

Find a Grave lists 15 Soules in that cemetery, including Amasa and Susannah; and Eliza Marden Soule, born Sept. 28, 1802, died Aug. 24, 1880; widow of Amasa and Susannah’s son, Samuel Riley.

Find a Grave says Ezekiel was the last Soule child, and Eliza was his wife. There are gravestones for each in Palermo’s Perkins cemetery; Eliza’s stone identifies her as Ezekiel’s wife.

FamilySearch adds a thirteenth child and seventh daughter:

— Mattie, born in 1807 (no additional information).

There is almost no information on line except dates of birth and death, marriages and children – nothing about occupations, for example. FamilySearch says Amasa Soule “registered for military service in 1779,” and was living in Lincoln in 1820. The latter information probably comes from a census record; your writer suspects the word means Lincoln County, not the town of Lincoln.

In 1847, Howard wrote in his Palermo history, Joseph Soule had six children attending Palermo’s Foye school on Level Hill Road, and Ezekiel had one child enrolled. That year, too, eight of Samuel’s children were on the Carr’s Corner school roster.

Howard listed Ezekiel, John and Joseph Soule among the militiamen who qualified as veterans of the War of 1812 by marching to Wiscasset and back in September 1814.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).

Websites, miscellaneous.

by Mary Grow

Note: parts of this article were previously published in the Oct. 7, 2021, issue of The Town Line.

The Town of Palermo’s first settlers arrived around 1776 or 1777. By 1778 the area was called Great Pond Settlement, because, Milton Dowe explained in his 1954 history, it was “near the Sheepscot Great Pond,” now 1,193-acre Sheepscot Lake (the third largest in Waldo County, according to state data last reviewed in 1992).

Dowe and Millard Howard, in his 2015 history, each named some of Palermo’s early settlers, starting with Stephen Belden.

Many early settlers had large families, Dowe said (implying a need for schooling). He wrote that John Cain had 18 children (FamilySearch says he and Mary [Longfellow] Cain had at least six sons and four daughters); Amasa Soule, 13 (Find a Grave lists eight born to Susannah [Holbrook] Soule); Jacob Worthing, 12 (FamilySearch agrees, listing nine sons and three daughters of Jacob and Elizabeth [Healey] Worthing).

Howard named Jacob as one of three Worthings who settled in Palermo in the 1780s. Jacob chose what is now the Branch Mills area; Howard wrote that he had so many descendants that in the 19th and 20th centuries Branch Mills Village, both Palermo and China sides, was full of Worthings.

Dowe mentioned plantation meetings beginning in 1801, but said nothing about appropriations. The Massachusetts legislature incorporated the Town of Palermo on June 23, 1804; the first town meeting was not held until Jan. 9, 1805, in Robert Foye’s house.

Town officials elected at that 1805 meeting included a three-man school committee: Christopher Erskine Sr., Samuel Longfellow and Stephen Marden.

Neither voters nor the committee did anything about providing school buildings right away. Until 1811, Dowe wrote, schools “were kept in dwelling houses and such places as were available.”

In 1811, Palermo voters created seven school districts. Dowe and Howard wrote six schoolhouses were built by 1812, District 7’s in 1822 (in a “more recently settled area” in East Palermo, Howard explained).

The Center school (District 3) was at the intersection of Nelson Lane and Marden Hill Road (north of Route 3, on a contemporary on-line map the intersection of Nelson Lane with Marden Hill, Belden Woods and Parmenter roads). This building was the only more-than-one-room school in Palermo until 1953, Howard said; Dowe said it had “two rooms with fireplaces.”

The town rented one room, for three dollars a year, and town meetings were held there.

Howard wrote that by 1843, residents of District 3 were tired of hosting town meetings. The 14-article warrant for their April 15 district meeting included articles about either repairing the schoolhouse or building a new one (and if a new one, what kind and other details).

Art. 8 asked if district voters would tell their agent to tell the selectmen “that we forbid them notifying any more Town meetings to be held at the center school house.”

“The eviction passed,” Howard reported. Voters funded Palermo’s first town house in 1844.

District 7, in southeastern Palermo, Howard said, was named Glidden; two of James L. Glidden’s children were enrolled in 1847. In 1857, Glidden was the district agent. Later District 7 agents included Asa Boynton, who could not write his own name; he signed documents with an X.

District 7 had several schoolhouses in different locations, Howard said. On Nov. 2, 1832, district voters raised $157.06 to build one of them. (Dowe wrote that the first District 7 schoolhouse was built in 1822; either it was a temporary building, or there was a fire or other calamity, or one of the dates is wrong.) District 7 apparently closed down in 1891.

In 1829, a major reorganizations added Districts 9, 10 and 11. Districts 9 and 10 were near Branch Mills; District 11 was in southwestern Palermo.

District 12, created in the early 1830s, was in North Palermo near the Freedom town line. Howard said it was small – 12 students in 1847 – and its leaders “probably rented space in a dwelling house” rather than building a schoolhouse. In 1860, families were “set off” to Freedom and the district abolished.

By the spring of 1837 there was a District 13, with a schoolhouse at Carr’s Corner, on North Palermo Road. Howard said it was “carved out” of earlier districts 3 and 4.

Dowe quoted from records of a March 22 district meeting, at which voters agreed to hire a schoolmaster instead of a schoolmistress; authorized Eli Carr to board him for a dollar a week (with the provision that if the schoolmaster didn’t want to stay at Carr’s, he could “take the money and board where he pleases”); and awarded the bid for 2.5 cords of firewood to Sumner Carr “at $2.17.”

District 15 was another small one near Freedom, organized in the late 1830s. Howard doubted there was ever a schoolhouse. There were five students in 1847, four in 1849; in 1860 this district’s families, like District 12’s, were transferred to Freedom.

The District 17 schoolhouse, in East Palermo, was the last to be built, after, Howard said, families in the northern part of District 7 couldn’t persuade the rest of district voters to “locate the school nearer to them” and got a separate district approved.

Paul Ames built this schoolhouse. Howard said the building was planned at a May 18, 1857, meeting in Ames’ cooper’s shop, and he was paid $177.50. Additionally, Edward Bradstreet earned $6.50 “for building little house.” This was one of three schools still in operation when Palermo Consolidated School opened in 1953.

The District 17 building served for years as “a sort of community house,” Dowe said. It hosted prayer meetings; the Young People’s Christian Endeavor group; funerals; singing, writing and spelling schools; and various entertainments, including listening to early phonographs (for an admission fee). Sheepscot Lake Grange was organized there (on-line sources say in 1905).

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Palermo schoolhouses, like other towns’, tended to be in local population centers. Dowe wrote No. that by 1859 there was a school at the southern end of Sheepscot Lake, on or near Turner Ridge Road, in what he described as a settlement with numerous houses, a store, at least three mills and a shop that made plow beams. (An on-line source describes a plow beam as the wooden or metal connector between a plow and the harnesses of the oxen or horses pulling the plow.)

In 1860, Howard said, Greeley’s Corner, a/k/a Center Palermo (on what is now Route 3 a short distance west of the head of Sheepscot Lake), and Carr’s Corner (the intersection of North Palermo and Marden Hill roads, in the northern part of town) each had a schoolhouse, a church and at least one store.

Dowe quoted from the 1896 town report a total of $587.70 for two new buildings, at Carrs (Carr’s) Corner and Western Ridge. The first cost $250, the second $245, plus seats, freight, “transportation and setting up.”

“Stove and funnel for new houses” was a separate item, $14.10. Voters also approved $5 for “Repairs on house at Center.”

Howard explained that “Palermo never had 17 districts operating simultaneously”; nor did every district open its school every term.

Instead, some districts’ leaders and residents did what Howard called “moving school:” two districts would agree to alternate school terms, with as many students as possible in the non-operating district getting to the other district’s school. In practice, Howard said, the older students were the ones likely to walk the greater distance; and they seldom attended a summer term, because they were needed on the farm.

The practice of sending students to out-of-district schools crossed town lines. Howard said Palermo students in Districts 10 and 11, adjoining China, sometimes went to the closest China schoolhouse.

Like other central Kennebec Valley historians, Howard commented on inadequate building maintenance, untrained teachers and the multiplicity of textbooks. He wrote that each district teacher “had an average of 15-20 students, probably no two of whom were at the same level in the same book in any subject.”

Nevertheless, he said, for the students who attended regularly “the most important basic literacy goals were achieved.”

In his memoir, Palermo Things That I Remember in 1996, Dowe located one schoolhouse beside “an old chestnut tree” on property once owned by a Loder family, opposite where John Scates lived in the 1990s. There was a small granite quarry nearby, Dowe said.

In this book, Dowe, born in 1912, wrote that when he was in school, each student had to provide a “tablet” (paper, not a 21st-century electronic device) and pencils. The tablet cost five cents; a pencil cost a penny without an eraser, two cents with an eraser.

Dowe’s memoir mentions school transportation, again without a date, but obviously in pre-automobile times. (Dowe wrote that he saw his first automobile around 1916.) He named two men who ran “school teams.”

Ed Thurston used “a double-seated wagon” when roads were bare and “a pung with sleds” when roads were snowy. (A pung is a sleigh with a box-shaped body.) George Freeman “had the same equipment but it was covered and had curtains on the sides that could be rolled up.”

Dowe’s account is confusing, because the three roads he named as served by these drivers are in China, not in Palermo.

Dowe added that some Palermo students drove their own teams to school; the horses spent the days in a nearby barn. Transportation was not provided for students within a mile of a schoolhouse.

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Maine’s 1873 Free High School Act apparently was not implemented immediately in Palermo. Howard wrote that the first high-school courses were offered in 1882; by 1888, eight Palermo school districts offered them. He explained, “This meant that these districts were occasionally providing a ten-week high school term. There was no fixed course of study.”

Howard found an 1893 Kennebec Journal reference to a free high school at Carr’s Corner (District 13, on North Palermo Road) ending a term at the end of April.

Dowe mentioned the Academy Hall, on the China side of Branch Mills Village, described in the Jan. 23 account of China high schools as Barzillai Harrington’s high school. (For more information on Mr. Harrington, please see the Oct. 7, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Andrew Pottle, Palermo historian whose articles appeared in the Sept. 12 and Sept. 19, 2024, issues of The Town Line, told your writer that two of the high school principals were Charles Erskine and Lydia Kitchin.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954).
Dowe, Milton E. Palermo, Maine Things That I Remember in 1996 (1997).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).

Websites, miscellaneous.