Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Area Revolutionary War veterans

by Mary Grow

This sub-series started out to explore the effects of the American Revolution on Kennebec Valley towns, and turned into short biographies of some of the veterans who moved to the area after the war. In other words, one effect was an increase in population.

Not every veteran got his name in the history books for services to the town in which he settled, but some did. Returning to Major Carleton Edward Fisher’s history of Clinton, below are two examples of men he identified as Revolutionary War veterans who both held town offices and – with their wives’ indispensable help – contributed to population growth.

Unfortunately, historians almost never explored why men, and especially men with families, chose to leave more settled states and establish new lives in what was in the 1780s largely a forested wilderness. Even explaining that one family came to join a related family (as with several examples below) fails to explain what moved the first family.

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Timothy Hudson, born in 1747, came to the Kennebec around 1783 and lived in Clinton and Fairfield. On Sept. 20, 1781, he married Jane Brown, youngest sister of Ezekiel Brown, Jr., another veteran (see the Oct 2 issue, of The Town Line, p. 10). Ezekiel, Jr., and his wife, Mary Barron, had 10 children; the Hudsons had four daughters and four sons, born between 1784 and about 1803, at least three of whom married locally.

Like his brother-in-law, Ezekiel Jr., Hudson “held several town offices, including selectman, and six times was elected tithingman,” Fisher wrote. He was the town’s first treasurer, in 1790.

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Veteran Andrew Richardson, born in August 1760, came to Clinton in 1786 (his older brother, William, came in 1782, and later moved to Winslow). Fisher wrote that he captained Clinton’s first militia company and was elected its first selectman and tax collector in 1795.

Richardson served as one of the three selectmen in 1800, 1801, 1804, 1805, 1811 and 1812, according to Fisher’s list. He was tax collector in 1795; town clerk in 1798; town treasurer in 1797, 1803 and 1806-07; and in 1810 represented the town in the Massachusetts legislature.

Richardson married Hannah Grant on Aug. 15, 1782, Fisher said (probably citing a “family historian”). Between Dec. 3 of that year and 1804 or thereabouts, they had eight sons and two daughters (fifth son Hobart was also a Clinton selectman, for two years in the 1820s); two sons died in childhood.

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Fisher noted another veteran of importance to the town: Michael McNelly or McInelly. Born in Pennsylvania in 1755, McNelly served in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, Fisher said. He was in Fairfield by 1790, Clinton until the 1840s.

McNelly had two wives by whom he fathered four sons and five daughters between 1788 and 1807. Fisher wrote in 1970: “This family has the distinction of being one of the earliest settlers whose descendants still live here.”

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One more Revolutionary veteran from Albion: Rev. Francis Lovejoy, grandfather of famous abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy and his brother, Illinois Congressman Owen Lovejoy. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her Albion history, named Francis Lovejoy as one of Albion’s first settlers, arriving before 1790.

Lovejoy was born Oct. 30, 1734, in Andover, Massachusetts. On Jan. 24, 1765, he married Mary Bancroft (born Aug. 2, 1742), from Reading, Massachusetts.

Wiggin said they soon moved to Amherst, New Hampshire, whence Lovejoy enlisted twice, first in “Colonel Baldwin’s regiment” and again “to fill a quota of 3 year men from Amherst.” FamilySearch dates the first enlistment 1776.

(When writing about Lovejoy’s war service for a January 2022 article, your writer tentatively identified “Colonel Baldwin” with Loammi Baldwin, born Jan. 10, 1744, who was at Lexington and Concord with the Woburn, Massachusetts, militia. She continued:

(“He later enlisted in the 26th Continental Regiment, quickly became its colonel and commanded it around Boston and New York City until health issues forced him to resign in 1777. Wikipedia identifies him as the ‘Father of American Civil Engineering’ and the man for whom the Baldwin apple is named.” Baldwin died Oct. 20, 1807.)

An essay on the Find a Grave website dates Lovejoy’s military interest to 1757, when he was a member of the Andover militia and served in the 1759 Canada Expedition (during the Seven Years War that ended with the British capture of Québec from the French).

This source says Lovejoy first enlisted in the Revolutionary army in September, 1776; his regiment was in the Battle of White Plains, New York (Oct. 28, 1776). It dates Lovejoy’s second enlistment March 5, 1781, and provides no date of discharge.

Between 1765 and 1783 or 1785, the Lovejoys had six or eight sons and three daughters (sources differ), four born during the war years. Two boys FamilySearch says died in infancy; it gives no death dates for four others.

Wiggin wrote that the family came to the Kennebec Valley in 1790, to the home of Francis’s brother, Abiel or Abial Lovejoy, in the west part of Vassalboro that became Sidney in 1792. Mary and some of the four boys and three girls (called by one source the surviving children, implying that several had died by then) stayed in Vassalboro while Francis cleared a space for a cabin on the west shore of Fifteen-Mile Pond (later renamed Lovejoy Pond).

The Daniel Lovejoy whom Kingsbury listed as Albion’s town clerk and town treasurer in 1802 was most likely Francis and Mary’s fourth (of eight, according to FamilySearch) sons, born in 1776 in Amherst, New Hampshire, married on April 20, 1802, in Clinton, Maine.

Mary Lovejoy died May 8, 1792, before her 50th birthday. Francis died Oct. 11 or Oct. 12, 1818, just before his 84th birthday. Both are buried in Albion’s Lovejoy Cemetery.

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John Linn (later the name became Lynn) was one of Windsor’s early settlers, arriving around 1809. WikiTree and FamilySearch say he was born in Boston on Aug. 17, 1754.

During the Revolution, Linn served in Massachusetts militia units. In his 1993 Windsor history, Linwood H. Lowden wrote that Linn was a prisoner of war during part of his service.

On May 13, 1779, Linn married Rebecca “Babra” Anderson, in Shelburne, Massachusetts. She was born Sept. 3, 1759, Find a Grave says.

Meanwhile, Linn’s sister, Polly, and her husband, George Russell, moved to Bristol, Maine, and before 1800 George bought 100 acres “in a wilderness area north of Bristol that would eventually become Windsor, Maine.” On Nov. 8, 1800, Linn bought his brother-in-law’s land.

When the Linns moved to their Windsor land is unclear in Lowden’s account. Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history says they “brought eleven children to Windsor,” and settled in 1803.

Lowden wrote that the family’s 10 children included several sons who were “close to adulthood.” They came from Boston to Bristol by ship and “walked most of the way from Bristol to Windsor,” he said.

FamilySearch lists four daughters and eight sons, of whom (at least) one son died in infancy. The first daughter was born in 1779, the last son in 1800, all apparently in Massachusetts.

Kingsbury lists John Lynn, Jr. (the oldest son, born in 17810, as a Windsor selectman, elected in 1812 and serving for five years, and as town clerk in 1812 and 1814 and town treasurer in 1813. The James Lynn who became treasurer in 1832 and apparently served for 15 years might have been another of John and Rebecca’s sons, born in 1790.

John Linn died April 28, 1834, and Rebecca died Dec. 20, 1834, in Windsor. They are buried in the town’s Resthaven Cemetery.

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One of China’s Revolutionary veterans was a black man named Abraham Talbot (the last name is spelled in many ways, including Tarbot, Tarbet, Talbart, Talbett, Turbut), described in the China bicentennial history as an ex-slave.

Find a Grave says he “was probably born enslaved,” because his mother was “probably” a slave in North Bridgewater (now Brockton), Massachusetts. This source calls him Private Abraham Talbot Sr., says he was born in 1757 and both he and his father, Toby Talbot, were Revolutionary soldiers.

An on-line genealogical site says Talbot was born May 27, 1756. On Sept. 3, 1787, still in Bridgewater, he married Mary (or Molley) Dunbar (born Feb. 22, 1758, in Braintree, Massachusetts). Her father, Sampson Dunbar, was also a Revolutionary soldier.

The genealogical website uses information from Talbot’s April 28, 1818, pension application for information about his military service. He wrote that he enlisted for nine months in May, 1778, and on July 10, 1778, at Fishkill, New York, joined a company in the Massachusetts Line (identified elsewhere as the 9th Massachusetts Regiment). He served until discharged in March, 1779, at least part of the time at West Point, New York.

In 1818, he wrote, his discharge papers had been destroyed when his house burned seven years earlier. He said he was “in reduced circumstances” and in need of support.

The application was accompanied by a declaration of his property, dated (the website says without explanation) May 25, 1820. Talbot wrote that he owned an acre of land and a “small hut,” with a combined value of $30; a “swine” worth five dollars; and another seven dollars’ worth of household goods and farm tools.

He also owned “10,000 ‘poor bricks in a kiln’ valued at $25.” The China history records, without specific dates, that Talbot owned a brickyard east of the head of China Lake, outside China Village.

In 1820, Talbot was about $100 in debt, and had maybe $10 of collectible debts owed to him.

He gave his occupation as “laborer” and wrote that he could not work much, “the flesh of my left leg being withered and perished.” He was living with his wife, Mary, who was 62 years old and unwell.

His pension application was approved.

The Talbots must have moved from Massachusetts to Maine right after they married, because the genealogical website lists all eight of their children – five sons, three daughters – as born in Fairfax (which later became Albion; parts of northern China and southern Albion swapped towns at intervals in the early 1800s). Oldest son, Ezekiel, was born Dec. 21, 1787; youngest daughter and last child, Roanna, was born Feb. 16, 1805. (Find a Grave says Ezekiel was born in Massachusetts.)

The website says when the 1800 census was taken, the Talbot household consisted of six people. Since six of the children were born before 1800, the website writer infers two children died in infancy.

Abraham Talbot died in Augusta or China (sources differ) on June 11, 1840. His widow died June 1, 1850.

Another on-line source describes the first Maine Colored Convention, held in Portland in October 1841. Among the delegates was Abraham Talbot Jr., described as “a window washer from Portland.”

This man was Abraham and Mary’s third son, born Feb. 28, 1792. The website reminds readers that the tradition of political involvement continues: among descendants of the older Abraham Talbot are Gerald Talbot, and his daughter, Rachel Talbot Ross.

Gerald Talbot, born in 1931, is the first black man to serve in the Maine House of Representatives. Talbot Ross, born in 1961, is Maine’s first black female legislator, elected to the House of Representatives in 2016. In December 2022, she “became the highest-ranking African American politician in Maine history” when she was elected speaker of the House, a position she held until December 2024. She is now a state Senator.

Main sources

Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward, History of Clinton, Maine (1970)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993)
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964)

Websites, miscellaneous.