by Mary Grow

Sidney, 1879

The Faughts were another early Sidney family. The first Faught your writer came across was Marlborough Packard Faught, a name that sounded refreshingly unusual; but she soon found that the Faughts, like the Bacons, enjoyed repeating more common names – Frederick, Jacob, Samuel – through generations.

Alice Hammond wrote in her history of Sidney that the Faughts “were active in community affairs on both sides of the Kennebec River [in Vassalboro and Sidney].”

She gave no details from early history, nor did Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history (Sidney was part of Vassalboro until it became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792). Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, included no Faughts on his lists of town officials.

(Hammond mentioned two 1915 events: George Faught, a Boston tailor, died that year and left money to the town “for the benefit of the school at or near Bacon’s Corner”; and on July 31, Florence Faught was chosen first Grand Matron of White Rose Chapter, No. 174, of the Order of the Eastern Star.

(Hammond said in 1992 the school fund had $3,000, from which interest could be used for students at Sidney’s only elementary school, James H. Bean School, on Middle Road. White Rose Chapter is no longer on the Maine list of Eastern Star chapters.)

Kingsbury named three Faughts, Anthony, Frederick and Jacob, as early settlers.

If your writer has found the right family, these were sons of a German named Philip Faught and his unidentified wife. Kingsbury wrote that Philip emigrated to Boston in 1751 and moved to Dresden, on the Kennebec below Augusta, in 1756.

Philip Faught’s sons are listed on Familysearch as Philip (1744 – 1772 or later); Frederick (1746 – 1814); Jacob (1750 – 1830) and Anthony (1752 – 1830). This site says all four Faught boys were born in Germany, despite Anthony’s birthdate the year after the family supposedly came to America.

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Philip, born in 1744, married a woman named Hannah and was identified as “of Vassalboro” at his death sometime after 1772. Your writer found no other information.

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Frederick, born around 1746, “came to America with the family and settled on the Kennebec in Sidney, where he spent the rest of his life,” Kingsbury wrote. (Presumably Frederick moved to Sidney later in his life, not in 1751 when he was about five years old.) He died April 1, 1814, and is one of many Faughts buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery, on West River Road, near the Augusta line.

On Oct. 31, 1775, Frederick married Thankful Durant (1751 – 1834), in Hallowell. Between 1779 and 1793, Familysearch says, Frederick and Thankful had at least four sons, Philip (again), Frederick (again), Jacob (again) and Samuel, and three daughters.

At least one early Faught settled toward the south end of the river road. Another settled on the middle road (west of and paralleling the river road) a mile south of Bacon’s Corner. Kingsbury mentioned two Faught farms, and said one was among several in Sidney with clay suitable for brick-making.

Frederick and Thankful’s four sons spent their lives in Sidney, continuing the family name. Philip (Nov. 7, 1783 – Dec. 31, 1855) married Anna Pinkham (born in 1788) on December 3, 1812, in Sidney; the couple had at least one son, whom they named Theodore (1818 – 1861), and one daughter, Mary Ann (1819 – 1910).

The second Frederick (Feb. 17, 1786 – April 16, 1861) married Susanna Packard (1796 – 1879), in Sidney. She was the daughter of Marlborough Packard, of Union, Massachusetts. Their six sons and two daughters, born between 1818 and 1836 and representing the third generation, in Sidney, started with Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – April 17, 1890), named after his maternal grandfather.

The next boy, born in 1821, was Frederic (without the final k, apparently), named for his father and paternal grandfather. The other children were named Caroline P. (1825), Luther R. (1828), Lemuel Porter (1830), Albert (1832), George N. (1834) and Frances Ann (1836).

Frederick and Thankful’s third son, Jacob (May 12, 1788 – Nov. 9, 1828), is listed as born in Augusta, but he and Sarah Reynolds (1795 – 1871) were marred July 9, 1818, in Sidney; their daughters Nancy, Lithia and Bethia or Bethiah and sons Jacob and Samuel, Jr., were born in Sidney between 1819 and 1826; and Jacob and Sarah both died in Sidney and are buried in the Sibley cemetery.

The youngest of this generation of Faughts, Samuel, is also listed as born in Augusta, on April 13 or 14, 1793 (Familysearch and Find a Grave disagree by a day). He married Susan M. Boyd, born in 1796 or 1797. They had two or three children, more third-generation Sidney Faughts.

The two sources agree their oldest was Tryphosa French, born in 1823. She married her cousin, Frederick and Susanna’s son Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – 1890). Find a Grave records no children of this marriage; Familysearch lists, without details, sons Freddy B., born in 1855, and Henry M., born in 1857.

Tryphosa’s younger brother, Jacob Henry Faught, was born Nov. 11, 1829, in Sidney. He married another Sidney resident, Jane F. Reynolds (born April 11, 1835) on Jan. 9, 1861, Familysearch says in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This site says Jane was living in Sidney in 1850, 1860 and 1880; she died in Middlesex, Massachusetts, May 26, 1923, and is buried in Sibley cemetery with her husband, who died June 25, 1882.

Find a Grave says Jacob and Jane had a daughter, born Oct. 4, 1861, whom they named L’Orient Bemis Faught. L’Orient married a man named Thayer; she died in 1939, and she and her husband are buried in Connecticut. Familysearch adds two more daughters, Nellie A., born in 1868, and Jennie H., born in 1873.

Samuel and Susan had a third child, a son they named Samuel Faught, Jr, according to Find a Grave. His birthdate and history are unknown; he died Sept. 11, 1851 (probably in his 20s), and is buried in Sibley cemetery.

Susan Boyd Faught died Sept. 7, 1877; Samuel died Nov. 26, 1889, age 96. Find a Grave says both are buried in Sibley cemetery.

Thankful (Mrs. Frederick) Faught, mother or grandmother of the numerous Faughts just listed, is the only Faught Kingsbury named as involved in a community activity. When Sidney’s second Baptist church was organized Feb. 7, 1806, he wrote, the 17 initial members included Thankful Faught.

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Jacob, German emigrant Philip and his unknown wife’s third son, born about 1750, was a Vassalboro resident from the 1790 through 1830 censuses, Familysearch says. The website says he married Hannah Sedgley, born, in Bowdoinham, in 1752, on June 9, 1772, and between 1773 and 1796 the couple had two sons and 10 daughters. Burials that Find a Grave lists in Vassalboro’s Faught cemetery include Jacob and Hannah, without dates.

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Philip’s youngest son, Anthony, was born about 1752 (a conflict with the 1751 emigration date). Kingsbury posed another puzzle when he referred to him first in 1791 and wrote that he left Germany “to avoid service in the army,” which would not have been a problem for an infant. (Either your writer is conflating two Anthony Faughts, or this Anthony did not join his brothers in America until he was a young man.)

Familysearch says Anthony married Hannah Durant (or Durent; born in 1755), in Vassalboro, in April or May 1778. They had at least three sons and two daughters between 1780 and 1797. The website says Hannah was the younger sister of Anthony’s older brother Frederick’s wife Thankful.

Familysearch says Anthony lived in Vassalboro “for about 12 years and Sidney…for about 10 years.” He died in Sidney sometime after 1830.

Hammond and Kingsbury agreed that in 1791, Anthony Faught became the third owner of a lot granted in 1763 to Levi Powers, on the west side of the river road, not far north of the Augusta line. (See box.)

The Faughts and the Levi Powers House

The important point about Anthony Faught buying the land originally granted to Levi Powers, according to Alice Hammond and to Frank Beard and Robert Bradley, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, is that the Faught family thereby acquired, and held onto until the late 1920s, the Levi Powers House.

Levi Powers House, in Sidney.

This house is now on the Register of Historic Places in Maine, one of two historic properties in Sidney. (The other is Tiffany Hill Chapel, which your writer described in the Aug. 19, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Hammond wrote that staying in the same family for so long “may help to explain why the home retains so many of its original features and why the original grant and the deed showing Anthony Faught’s purchase of lot 37 remain in the home.”

In their 1979 application for historic register listing, Beard and Bradley called the building a “remarkably preserved Colonial house [that] is of particular importance because of size and fineness of proportion in the context of a newly settled area. It remains little changed either externally or internally and better than most conveys an accurate impression of its time and place.”

Levi Powers got his grant from the Kennebec Proprietors in 1763, Hammond wrote. He acquired “a little over 100 acres on the [Kennebec] river and about 150 acres in the third tier of land,” a couple miles farther west.

Beard and Bradley assumed he had to clear a lot of forested land before he could build his “large and substantial” house. They date the house from around 1700.

The Powers house is a two-story post-and-beam building, facing east, with a fieldstone foundation and internal chimneys near the north and south ends. The main entrance in the middle of the front façade opens into the central hall; the front is five bays wide, the north and south sides three bays. There is a one-story ell on the south side.

Inside, the historians commented on “common pineapple stencilling in deteriorated condition in the front hall,” probably from the 1830s, and the “extensive and finely detailed wood graining in the kitchen and dining room.” Hammond attributed the stencils to Moses Eaton (Moses Eaton and his son, Moses Eaton, Jr., were famous New Hampshire-based folk artists in the early 1800s).

Beard and Bradley wrote: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Powers may well have been influenced in designing the house by the nearby Pownalboro Court House…, so similar are the proportions, roof pitch and framing of the two buildings.”

Hammond said Powers sold his house on Oct. 31, 1778, to Jethro Gardner, who on Dec. 23, 1782, sold it to Anthony Faught for 800 pounds.

On July 15, 1818, Hammond found, Anthony sold the house to John and Elijah Faught (presumably his youngest sons), for $2,000. (An online source says the United States dollar replaced the British pound and other currencies in 1792.)

Hammond continued to track sales within the Faught family until 1928, when “the farm” went to Civil War veteran Simon C. Hastings (1843 – 1948), who was probably the widower of Ellen Hannah Faught (1845 -1912) (two more Faughts who are buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery).

Hammond wrote that Hastings auctioned off the house contents and burned the unsold furniture. He sold the house in 1929; it passed through several owners before William and Charlotte Sawtelle acquired it in 1977. Hammond wrote that in 1992, the Sawtelles were still “working to preserve the historical integrity of the house.”

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, Powers House July 1979.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

by Mary Grow

The town on the west bank of the Kennebec River south of Waterville that is now Sidney began as part of Vassalboro, the town on the east bank.

There seems to be unanimous agreement among historians that Sidney was incorporated as a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792, and that it was named after the British courtier, man of letters and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). (See box.)

The historians your writer found are equally unanimous in their silence on two topics: why Sidney separated from Vassalboro, and why the new town was named in honor of a 200-years-dead Englishman.

Two important sources your writer consulted are Alma Pierce Robbins’ 1971 history of Vassalboro and Alice Hammond’s 1992 history of Sidney. Both wrote about the Native Americans who lived along that stretch of the Kennebec and the Europeans who supplanted them.

Hammond, focused on the west bank of the river, repeated two legends about the Natives, one that indicated that swimming across Messalonskee Lake was a test of hardihood for young Natives, boys and girls alike.

Messalonskee Lake, aka Snow Pond, was once entirely in western Sidney and is now shared by Sidney and Belgrade, the next town west. It is more than eight miles long and makes up about the northern two-thirds of Sidney’s west boundary.

Hammond, again quoting the collector of legends, wrote that the name Messalonskee came from the Native word “muskalog,” or giant pike (still known as a muskellunge or muskie). Wikipedia says the alternate name Snow Pond recognizes Philip Snow, a settler there in 1774.

(Another important wet area is the Great Sidney Bog, in the southern end of town. In William D. Williamson’s 1832 History of the District of Maine, he wrote that Sidney covered 20,000 acres, “of which 1,000 is a bog.”

(Hammond, in 1992, said the bog covered 640 acres, two-thirds in Sidney and the rest in Augusta. An on-line State of Maine website calls the bog an area of statewide ecological significance, a 605-acre example of a Raised Level Bog.)

In her Vassalboro history, Robbins gave the 1761 survey by Nathan Winslow as the Kennebec Proprietors’ action that spurred settlement on the Vassalboro section of the Kennebec. Early family names she mentioned include Bacon, Faught, Lovejoy and Marsh.

“The land transactions in Vassalboro were in the beginning more active on the west side of the river,” Robbins wrote. One reason she gave was the streams that flowed into the Kennebec from the west and were dammed to provide water power for sawmills and grist mills.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, gave a second reason, Sidney’s “superior attractions for settlement.”

“After inspecting the adjacent sections on either side, an observer must have been agreeably impressed, then as now, with its comparatively level surface and the infrequency of rugged hills and still more rugged rocks,” he wrote.

For the prospective farmer, he continued, “The soil on the eastern half, that borders the river, is very favorable for cultivation and the production of grain and grass, but not as well adapted to fruit trees as the western half, in which apples are a staple crop.”

He also praised the “variety and enormous growth” of the forests, which kept mills busy “for more than half a century”; and recognized the value of the river as a transportation artery for farm and forest products.

After Vassalboro was incorporated on April 26, 1771, Robbins wrote that the first town meeting was held May 22, 1771, at James Bacon’s. She described him as “physician and innkeeper.” He is referred to in various sources as Dr. James Bacon and as James H. Bacon; your writer thinks these references are all to the same man.

Robbins did not say on which side of the Kennebec James Bacon had his tavern. Michael Denis, in his extensive Bacon genealogy, says it was on the west – Sidney – side; and your writer has found supporting evidence.

Dr. James Bacon was born June 30, 1738, in Billerica, Massachusetts. On Sept. 23, 1764, in Hallowell, he married Abigail Marsh, born in Menden, Massachusetts, Nov. 24, 1747. Her father, John Marsh, had come to what would become Sidney in 1760; in 1763, Denis wrote, Bacon received a land grant in future Sidney.

Between 1767 and 1790, Familysearch says, the James Bacons had seven daughters and three sons (other sources list fewer children). They named their oldest daughter, who was born in 1767 and died in 1812, Abigail. Her birthplace is given as Kennebec, Maine, and she married a Vassalboro man in 1786.

The oldest son was James Josiah Bacon, born in 1770 and died in 1834. Familysearch says he was born in Vassalboro and married a Vassalboro woman in 1791.

At least four of James and Abigail’s children were born in Sidney, according to Familysearch. They were Sarah B., born in 1775 (and died in Sidney); Lydia, born in 1781 (and died in Sidney); William Marsh, born Sept. 22, 1782 (and was married and died in Sidney); and Ebenezer, born in 1788. Hannah, born in Maine about 1778, died in Sidney (Find a Grave has a photo of her gravestone in Sidney’s Field Cemetery; it says she died June 11, 1867, age 89).

James Bacon’s older brother, Ebenezer Bacon, was definitely a Sidney resident. Robbins cited a July 14, 1773, deed to him from the Kennebec Proprietors for 500 acres “lying on the West side of the Kennebec River.”

Ebenezer Bacon was born in Bedford, Massachusetts, on Sept. 15, 1736, and married Abigail Farwell (1734-1817), in Boston, in 1762. She was the widow of Levi Richardson, whom she had married in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753.

Ebenezer and Abigail had at least two daughters and two sons, born between Jan. 1, 1763 and Aug. 23, 1770; Familysearch says all four were born in Sidney. The older boy was Ebenezer Bacon Jr., born in 1765; the younger girl, born in 1770, was Abigail.

The senior Ebenezer died Feb. 12, 1798, in Sidney. Abigail died in Vassalboro in September 1817.

Robbins summarized what she considered major actions at that first Vassalboro town meeting in 1771, and at following ones. Among decisions pertinent to Sidney were a spring 1773 vote to provide “a burying ground on each side of the river”; and a November 1773 decision to build a meeting house on the “west side of the river.”

In 1786, she wrote, without further explanation: “Talk of separating the Town by the river began, the east side to keep the incorporation.” A few paragraphs later, Robbins wrote, “In 1793 the accounts between the Towns of Sidney and Vassalborough were adjusted, and Vassalborough became the east side of the Kennebec River.”

When Alice Hammond took up the story of Sidney as a separate town, she described the 1761 survey by Nathan Winslow that laid out three tiers of lots on either shore of the Kennebec. In 1774, she continued, John Jones surveyed two more tiers west of the original three, “completing the survey from the Kennebec River west to Lake Messalonskee.”

Between the two surveys was a narrow strip, called a gore (many Maine towns had gores). The gore, too, was divided into lots. Hammond wrote that one of its six sections, including five of its 56 lots, was named the Bacon Tract .

Hammond found copies of land deeds from the 1770s at the Kennebec Registry of Deeds in Augusta. She listed some of the early Sidney landowners as Dr. James Bacon, Ebenezer Bacon, Abiel (alternately spelled Abial in the early documents she cited) Lovejoy, and John Marsh.

She then reprinted a Feb. 26, 1892, Kennebec Journal article listing early Sidney settlers, in recognition of the town’s 100th anniversary.

This list includes William Bacon (Sept. 22, 1782 – Oct. 15, 1852), James and Abigail’s son. The newspaper writer said:

“Mr. Bacon kept a tavern in the house that sits where Carlos Hammond now [1892] lives and it is said used to dispense ‘New England rum’ at a ‘four pence ha’penny’ a glass. It was from him that Bacon’s Corner takes its name.”

An on-line map shows Bacon’s Corner in south central Sidney, west of Interstate 95, the four-way intersection of Dinsmore and Shepherd roads with Middle Road.

Sidney’s first town meeting, Hammond said, was called by Abial Lovejoy, constable, at David Smiley’s. Smiley she described as an “inn keeper on the River Road,” the closest to the Kennebec of several north-south roads through Sidney.

Hammond did not date the first meeting, but it was early in 1792, because the second one was in May of that year, she said. Voters at that meeting chose a four-man committee to settle accounts with Vassalboro.

Hammond said nothing more about the committee, but apparently its work succeeded, since Robbins was able to report that the towns’ accounts were settled in 1793.

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney

Wikipedia’s long article on Sir Philip Sidney calls him a “poet, courtier, scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age.”

He was born Nov. 30, 1554, at Penshurst Place, a still-standing medieval castle 32 miles southwest of London. The house, built in 1341, had been in the family since 1552, when King Edward VI granted it to Sidney’s grandfather.

Sidney was the oldest of at least three children. Educated at Christ Church, part of Oxford University, he went on his first diplomatic mission at age 18, one of a delegation that failed to arrange a marriage between Queen Elizabeth and a son of the French King Henry II.

(Readers may remember that Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, was known as “the virgin queen” – she never did marry.)

After three years in Europe, Sidney returned to England where, Wikipedia says, he occupied himself with “politics and art,” including terms in Parliament in the 1580s. Simultaneously he was active in the military, fighting for the Protestant cause in Ireland in 1575 and 1576 and in the Netherlands in 1585 and 1586.

His literary works included a collection of poems, a romance and a critical work on poetry. The Wikipedia writer considered the last two influential in the subsequent development of English literature.

Queen Elizabeth knighted Sidney in 1583. The same year, he married Frances Walshingham, 16-year-old daughter of the Queen’s principal secretary; they named their daughter, born in 1585, Elizabeth.

On Sept. 22, 1586, Sidney was wounded at the Battle of Zutphen in the Netherlands, where English troops were supporting Dutch Protestants against Spanish Catholics. He died of gangrene on Oct. 17, aged 31.

Main sources

Denis, Michael J., Families of Oakland, Maine December 2023 found on line.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.