The apple harvest.
Sidney
Last week’s article discussed the beginnings of European settlers’ agriculture in central Kennebec County, drawing heavily from Samuel L. Boardman’s chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 county history.
(Your writer has discussed agriculture twice before, in the spring of 2021 (issues for March 11 through May 13) and in the fall of 2023 (issues for Sept. 7 through Oct. 19). Each time she takes a different approach, requiring different information and different connections. Readers wishing to see how often she contradicts herself are encouraged to check back issues, available on line.)
Boardman named about two dozen prominent early agriculturalists. Most lived in the southern and western parts of the county, outside the central Kennebec Valley where this history series is centered. Among those Boardman featured were Sanford Howard and brothers Benjamin and Charles Vaughn in Hallowell; Dr. Ezekiel Holmes and brothers Samuel and Elijah Wood in Winthrop; and Revolutionary General Henry Dearborn, later President Jefferson’s Secretary of War, in Monmouth.
In the towns upon which your writer has focused, Boardman mentioned three agriculturalists he considered important: Rev. W. A. P. (William Addison Pitt) Dillingham, of Sidney (see box); R. (Reuben) H. Greene (or Green), of Winslow; and Jesse Robinson, of Waterville.
He cited many others for specific achievements, like breeding cattle, sheep and horses and planting orchards, mostly but not entirely apples.
Boardman’s lists of notable producers of agricultural goods are almost entirely men’s names, or initials that turn out to be men’s, like Dillingham and Greene above. “Miss L. L. Taylor, [of] Belgrade” is a conspicuous exception, in his list of “most intelligent, progressive fruit growers in the county” and owners of the largest orchards, as of 1892.
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Alice Hammond expanded and rearranged Boardman’s information for the chapter on agriculture in her 1992 history of Sidney.
She repeated his praise of the town as one of Kennebec County’s “garden towns,” and observed that Sidney farmers raised the hay, apples, potatoes and corn that Boardman named as typical.
Hammond began with field crops: “Early Sidney farmers raised some wheat, buckwheat, oats, and other grains, but hay was and still is the most important staple crop raised in the town.”
Hay was one of Maine’s larger exports when cities relied on horse-drawn transportation, Hammond wrote. That period began in the 1830s and ran into the20th century; from about 1860 to the end of the century, horses were the moving power for people and goods. Motorized vehicles began appearing early in the 20th century and took over in the 1920s.
Hammond cited a farm census that showed Sidney producing “more than 5,700 tons of hay in 1850.” As late as 1925, the town’s hay production was 5,610 tons.
After hay, Hammond wrote, apples were for many years the town’s second largest crop. Early in the 1800s, farmers focused on hayfields and planted their apples along the edges or on rougher land that was unsuitable for hay-growing.
Without giving dates, Hammond described maintaining an orchard: pruning the trees in February, spraying from late spring until early fall, harvesting through October and selling the rest of the year.
“In earlier years,” (unspecified), Hammond wrote that Sidney orchardists stored their apples in bins in their cellars and bought wagon-loads of apple barrels from Somerville. Each barrel held 11 pecks of apples (there are four pecks in a bushel, so a barrel was one peck less than three bushels).
Taking in the hay.
As the harvest ended, Hammond wrote, apple packers would come to town, by around 1900 usually in six-man crews hired by agents of wholesale companies based in Boston or Providence. These agents would contract with the orchard-owners; the packers would stay on the farm as long as necessary.
“They would spend all day in the cellar, working under a large kerosene lamp, sorting the apples and packing them into barrels,” Hammond wrote.
She said the barrels were packed so full that the tops had to be screwed down. After railroads reached the area in the 1850s, the crop was shipped out by rail. Hammond described multiple routes, again without providing dates.
One orchard owner, on Bartlett Road on the east side of Messalonskee Lake, sent his crop either on horse-drawn sleds across the frozen lake to Belgrade Depot, at the lake’s southwest end; or to the Oakland station, northwest of Sidney.
Others closer to the Kennebec River that is Sidney’s eastern boundary used the two ferries, at Riverside and at Vassalboro (Getchell’s Corner) to send apples to the Vassalboro railroad stations. Hammond wrote that when the river froze, “they risked their lives, teams, and loads” to cross on the ice.
“Many stories have been told of the close calls they had and of the not-so-fortunate who went through the ice.”
Not all apples were sold and exported. Early in the 1800s, Hammond wrote, cider mills “were scattered through town”; orchardists brought their “lesser grades of apples” to be made into vinegar or cider (including hard cider; Hammond wrote that as the temperance movement gained popularity in the 1850s, the number of mills decreased).
Hammond mentioned sweet corn as a third important crop on Sidney farms, but gave no statistics or details. Maine corn was canned and shipped to other states and to Europe, she wrote. Production probably started before the Civil War.
Boardman, writing about Kennebec County, called corn a “specialty” crop, and listed canning plants in several towns close to Sidney, including Oakland, Belgrade and Vassalboro.
In 1892, he wrote, “The crop yields about $50 per acre, leaving the stalks for winter fodder.” Hammond expanded on its utility: indeed, a cash crop and producer of forage for the cattle, and sweet corn also used the farm’s manure and the farm family’s labor.
Sidney seems to have been less important than other area towns in breeding cattle, horses and sheep. Hammond barely mentioned them, beyond observing that a self-sufficient farm would probably have some.
She did refer back to Boardman, who named Luther and Bradford Sawtelle as important cattle breeders in the 1830s and 1840s, and Dillingham and C. K. Sawtelle as “sheep farmers of note.”
Boardman summarized the introduction of Shorthorn cattle in Kennebec County in the 1820s and 1830s, and the decline of interest in careful breeding between 1835 and 1850. The early breeders had died or retired, and no one took over. Only when “deterioration became evident in the leading herds” did a new generation assume “the responsibility of obtaining high price registered stock from abroad, or improving the best of that which remained.”
The American Shorthorn Association website says the breed, also called Shorthorn Durham, originated in northeastern England. The first Shorthorn Durhams were brought to Virginia in 1783. The website continues:
“Shorthorns were popular with America’s early settlers. They valued this breed for meat and milk and found Shorthorns a willing power for the wagon and plow.”
Among 19 men Boardman credited for reviving Shorthorns were Luther and Bradford Sawtell (no final e), of Sidney. Unfortunately, he gave no information beyond their names.
Other sources says Luther Sawtelle was born Aug. 7, 1800, and died June 25, 1872; his younger brother, Bradford Jorel Sawtelle was born May 18, 1811, and died Nov. 12, 1897.
Boardman repeated, from a book about American privateers, that in 1812 the privateer “Teaser,” from New York, captured a British brig with a cargo worth $100,000 that included “a bull and a cow of the Holderness breed.”
Descendants “soon found their way to Sidney and Vassalboro,” Boardman wrote. They were known as the Prize stock. He gave no details about what Sidney famer(s) had some.
Holderness cattle, Wikipedia says, started as a Dutch breed of dairy cow imported into the Holderness region of Britain before 1840. The Wikipedia article, which warns readers in a note dated 2023 that some of its information is disputed, suggests that the breed is ancestral of Holsteins and no longer exists.
Sidney had at least one sheep farm before the Civil War: Boardman credited Dillingham with bringing in two breeds, Oxford Downs and Southdowns, in 1858. (H. C. Burleigh introduced Southdowns in Waterville that year, too, Boardman said.)
The American Southdown Breeders’ Association webpage says the Southdown is one of the oldest purebred sheep in the world, originating more than 250 years ago in the part of Sussex, England, known as the Downs. Southdowns might have been brought to America in the 1640s.
The Oxford Down Sheep Breeders Association website says this breed is also of British origin, but much newer. The Oxford Down was developed in the 1830s by “crossing Cotswold rams with Hampshire Down and Southdown ewes.” The main breeding place was in Oxfordshire, so the breed was named Oxford Down.
William Addison Pitt Dillingham
William Addison Pitt Dillingham was born Sept. 4, 1824, in Hallowell. His mother died in 1828 and his father in 1830; he was raised by an uncle in Augusta.
After a semester at Waterville (later Colby) College, he enrolled in the divinity school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was ordained in a Universalist minister in 1847, and, according to the “Universalist Register,” served first in Augusta and then in other Maine towns. Different sources list Sidney, where he bought a farm, Augusta, Dover, Norridgewock and Waterville.
Dillingham married Caroline Price Townsend, of Sidney, born in 1816 or May 25, 1817 (the latter, from the Find a Grave website, is more probably accurate). FamilySearch says they had five children: Mary Elizabeth, born in 1848 and died in 1854; Thomas Manley (1850 -1925); Pitt (1852 -1926), also a minister who lived most of his life in Massachusetts; and twins, Mary Wilhelmina (1861-1894) and Mabel Wilhelmina (1861 – 1898).
Boardman, in Kingsbury’s history, listed Dillingham among area farmers who “contributed largely to the success of the fairs” sponsored by the North Kennebec Agricultural Society, which was organized in 1847.
In 1864 and 1865 Dillingham was Waterville’s representative in the Maine House, serving as Speaker in 1865. An on-line list of House speakers describes him as a 40-year-old Republican.
His obituary in Maine’s Piscataquis Observer, found on the Find a Grave website, says he was a “Special Agent of the Treasury in Mississippi, about a year under Prest. Johnson, and one of the Trustees of the Agricultural College.” (Andrew Johnson served as president from 1865 to 1869.)
In 1867 Dillingham converted from the Universalists to the Swedenborgians, for whom he preached in Chicago before rejoining the Universalists there in 1870. In 1871, the “Register” says, he had just come back to his Sidney farm and arranged to preach in Sidney when he died suddenly of pneumonia on April 22, 1871.
Dillingham is buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove Cemetery, with his wife, Caroline, who died Sept. 23, 1870, in Sidney; daughters Mary Elizabeth and Mabel Wilhelmina; both sons, Pitt and Thomas; Pitt’s widow, Florence Batchelder Bell Dillingham (August 1865 – 1928); and one more Dillingham, for whom Find a Grave provides no first name, who died in 1857.
Main sources:
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Websites, miscellaneous.
The following area students have been named to the University of New England’s dean’s list for the spring semester 2025, in Biddeford:
Area students at Cedarville University, in Cedarville, Ohio, have been named to the dean’s list for the Spring 2025 semester. They include Catherine Estes, of Sidney, and Josette Gilman, of China.
