Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China town reports – 1854 – 1906 (Part 3)

by Mary Grow

Following are more excerpts from an incomplete collection of China’s town reports, dating from the mid-1850s through most of the 20th century. This week’s selections will illustrate more of the changes in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Thanks to John Glowa, of China, and Phil Dow, of Albion, for providing these sources of information.

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A separate account for “Militia” appears in the financial sections of the 1863 and 1864 town reports. The cost reported March 10, 1863, was $14,556.64, almost twice the town’s available resources. The selectmen borrowed money.

As of March, 1864, the selectmen had borrowed more money to fill China’s volunteer quota per President Abraham Lincoln’s Oct. 17, 1863, call, a total of $11, 252.57.

Most of this money, the bicentennial history says, paid bounties to men who enlisted. Voters at several special town meetings argued over details. Ultimately, the history says, China paid $47,735.34 “to provide Civil War soldiers.” After the state began repaying towns in 1868, China got $12,708.33 back.

The militia account disappeared as of the 1864-1865 report. As summarized previously (see the Dec. 11 issue of “The Town Line”), the debt did not disappear for more than a decade.

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China’s Board of Health appears in the 1889-1890 report, costing $25.25 for Chairman E. M. Dowe, Secretary G. J. (Dr. Gustavus Judson) Nelson and member C. E. Dunton. The board’s report is on the very last page of the town report, dated – your writer hopes misdated – Feb. 27, 1880 (not 1890).

The China bicentennial history says the board was created two years earlier (see box). The 1890 report is identified as the third annual, and reports the greatest “prevalence of infectious diseases” since the board was organized. Turns out there were two diseases: the diphtheria at the Maine Insane Hospital in Augusta never spread into China, but a Branch Mills family had two cases of typhoid fever and early in February (1890, presumably, since it was on-going when the report was written) another family had at least one case of scarlet fever.

The report explained that since typhoid fever isn’t air-borne, that house was not quarantined. The other house was, and the school in that district was closed.

The report ended optimistically: medicine was progressing, and “it does not seem impossible to conceive that the time may come when the cause of every contagious disease may be known, and with this knowledge may come absolute protection from every infectious disease.”

Nelson’s report for 1894-1895, submitted March 2, 1895, describes a year with four “outbreaks of infectious diseases,” each “confined to the house in which it originated.” None was fatal.

The first was in mid-June, 1894, scarlet fever (“one of the most dangerous and one of the most contagious” diseases with which the board dealt) on Stanley Hill, in northwestern China. The house was immediately quarantined, and no one else was infected.

In October, in Dr. Nelson’s practice (probably in the China Village area in northern China), two people in one household got diphtheria. In November, there was another case in Dr. B. N. Johnstone’s practice, in extreme southern China.

In January, 1895, there was a third diphtheria outbreak in Dr. D. A. Ridley’s practice in Branch Mills, in eastern China. Nelson reported the disease took hold “in a large family in indigent circumstances,” and since segregating the sick people was impossible, nine people caught it; only two “nursing infants” didn’t.

Nelson called diphtheria “one of the most dreaded diseases of modern times.” He commented that although it is transmitted directly between people and can be carried on infected clothing, it also is generated by “refuse matter, damp, foul air and decaying vegetable and animal matter.”

(Contemporary on-line sources primarily discuss transmission from an infected person to others, and emphasize that diphtheria is almost non-existent in countries where vaccination is common. Your writer found one implied reference to Nelson’s list of causes: the Cleveland Clinic’s website says: “Diphtheria is very rare in the U.S. because of widespread use of the diphtheria (Tdap) vaccine and cleaner living conditions.”)

In 1899-1900, the board’s three members – Nelson, J. E. Crossman and C. J. Lincoln – were paid only $20.25, but expenses for vaccinations brought the total cost to $115.25.

In 1900-1901, the Board of Health cost China $151.70, after Palermo reimbursed the town $136.62 for one family (including medical attendance, supplies and digging a grave and burying a child; it sounds as though some of these expenses could have been listed under care of the poor).

The selectmen explained that the increased cost was due to a diphtheria epidemic, adding, “we have to rejoice that the results have not been more fatal than they were.”

There was a separate two-item Town Physician Account: China received $79.50 “from other towns for med. att.” and paid town physician C. J. Lincoln $50 for services to April 5, 1901.

The March 4, 1901, Board of Health report said the diphtheria epidemic started in May, 1900, and made that year the most demanding board members had experienced. The first case was a Windsor girl who attended Erskine Academy and boarded in South China. The second was a girl in the Hanson neighborhood, who died; she had attended Erskine and then the Lakeside school (other Erskine students had moved to other town schools by May, the report says).

Ultimately there were 22 cases in the spring outbreak and two more, unrelated, later in the year. Five were fatal. Nelson’s report said he and another doctor used Mulford’s glycerinated antitoxin “with excellent success”; whenever it “was used in the first stages of the disease,” the patient survived.

Nelson was also the 1900-1901 school superintendent. He reported that he promptly closed the first two schools where diphtheria cases were reported. Soon, nine of the 13 schools holding spring sessions were either ordered suspended or suspended themselves “from the attendant fright.”

At a special meeting May 26, the school committee closed all but the four operating schools until fall, canceling any planned summer sessions. Classes resumed the last Monday in August.

The next year’s reports from health and school officials indicated a normal 1901-1902 year. Nelson left the board of health that year, but he continued to earn town payments for “reporting births and deaths” and other medical activities through 1914.

(Nelson was on the school committee in 1912-1913, 1913-1914 and 1914-1915. Only the other two members signed the committee’s Feb. 13, 1915, report. Nelson died Feb. 17, 1915, aged 68 years, eight months and four days. He is buried in the China Village cemetery, with other family members.)

In their March 2, 1903, report, board of health members said the town had experienced three cases of typhoid fever, with no deaths; a fatal case of tuberculosis; one case of measles; and 22 cases of whooping cough. The board’s secretary added a rebuke: “I find physicians and householders in the east and southeast parts of the town have failed to report many cases of whooping cough as the law requires them to do.”

For the year that ended March 10, 1905, Board of Health expenses totaled $28.98, paid to the three members: one earned $15.48, the second $11.00, the third $2.50. In 1905-1906, members earned $30.35 and others were paid $73.35 for caring for two families; listed expenditures included $4.10 for “pillows and blankets” for one of the families.

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The initial collection of town reports that started this series has a gap from the year ending March 7, 1890, to the year ending March 10, 1900. Phil Dow’s contributions included 1894-1895 and 1896-1897. (The missing issues are no doubt available elsewhere; but when your writer started these history pages, at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, her rule was to work from home.)

By the 1894-1895 issue, and in the ones that follow, pages of vital statistics were added. By 1897 and in following years, the reports ended with the annual town meeting warrants.

The 1894-1895 issue lists the numbers of marriage intentions (20) and marriages (24), the number of births (27) and the number of deaths (also 27). It records names of residents who died between March 7, 1894, and Feb. 15, 1895, and (where information is available) adds age, marital status, place of birth, place of death and place of burial. The following years’ reports use the same format, of course with varying numbers.

Beginning with the report for 1901-1902, names of couples marrying and of babies born were also printed. Babies’ names were not always available; between March 27, 1901, and Feb. 5, 1902, for instance, 24 births were recorded, but only 19 names.

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The Monday, March 15, 1897, town meeting was summoned for 9 a.m. at the town house The selectmen were to be there at 8 a.m. to make any needed corrections to voter lists.

The warrant has only 11 articles. The first is to elect a moderator, the second to “choose all necessary town officers for the ensuing year.”

Art. 3 asks to raise funds – no figures are included – for supporting the poor, schools, road and bridge maintenance and “all other necessary town charges.”

Arts. 4, 5 and 6 ask voters’ decisions on how to maintain roads and bridges and “break down the snow”; to work the road machine; and to collect taxes. Presumably, the selectmen and other town officials proposed methods.

Art. 7 asks for money to buy town bonds or establish a sinking fund to liquidate them, “and if any, how much.” Again, there is no suggested amount in writing.

Art. 8 asks for $100 to repair a schoolhouse. (Under current town meeting rules, when an amount is in the article, voters may approve it or any lesser amount, but not a higher amount.)

Art. 9 asks if voters want to buy a lot and build a schoolhouse “on the pond road,” and if so, how much they’ll appropriate. Art. 10 requests another $100 to repair another existing schoolhouse.

Art. 11 asks voters to accept a relocated road through Weeks Mills “laid out by the selectmen” and to appropriate money to pay for the change.

The China Board of Health

The China bicentennial history says before China had a board of health, town officials sometimes dealt with severe and contagious diseases. The book cites two examples of instances in which residents apparently thought their elected leaders acted unwisely.

In March 1848, town meeting voters told selectmen “to pay Ambrose Sewall, a reasonable compensation for Furniture burnt, in consequence of being infected with the Small Pox – also to pay the expense of cleansing his house &c….”

Voters at the March 1851, meeting told those selectmen to “settle with” William Fairbrother for housing smallpox patients in his house. At a special meeting in May, they raised $25 to pay Fairbrother “for loss sustained by the burning of his house” (because it was infected?).

(No one on the 1848 select board was still serving in 1851, but the change was gradual. Voters were not upset enough to throw out either board wholesale.)

The first China Board of Health was appointed in 1887, as required by a new state law. Its members created bylaws and rules for dealing with contagious diseases and adopted them on Aug. 26, 1887. The history says they were “approved by a justice of the supreme judicial court” and published in the Waterville “Sentinel,” and an attested copy went into town records.

“The regulations prescribed measures to prevent the spread of scarlet fever, typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera, typhus, and diphtheria, including detailed instructions for disinfecting clothing, bedding, blankets, and mattresses and for fumigating rooms,” the history says. Fumigating a room required setting on fire sulfur (three pounds for each thousand cubic feet) in an iron kettle and keeping the room closed for 24 hours before airing it for several days.

Main sources

China town reports
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)

Websites, miscellaneous.