Radio Script #397

Little Talks on Common Things

December 7, 1958

There are a few more items in the old Massachusetts Register for 1786 that are worthy of our attention 172 years later. One of these items is the page devoted to the Civil Officers of Lincoln County. At that time, of the four justices of common pleas, none lived nearer Waterville than James Howard of Hallowell. Two, in fact, William Lithgow and James McCobb, lived down near the mouth of the river at Georgetown. The fourth, Thomas Rice, was located at the county seat in Pownalborough, the old name for Dresden.

Naturally every settled town, however, had its own justice of the peace. In Winslow there were two: Ezekiel Pattee and Josiah Brewer. Eben Farwell held the office in Vassalboro, as did Peter Howard in Canaan. As would be expected, the high sheriff of the county lived at Pownalborough. He was Edmund Bridge, for whose family more than half a century later Bridge Academy was named. The county also had several coroners. Winslow had neither a coroner nor a deputy sheriff, but Vassalboro had both in the respective persons of Ebenezer Pattee and Nathaniel Bragg.

Equally interesting is what the 1786 Register has to say about the existing American colleges of that day. Of the oldest, Harvard, it said: “Our wise and pious ancestors, as early as the year 1636, laid the foundation of Harvard College at Cambridge, in which many persons of great eminence have been initiated in those arts and sciences which qualify them for public employment, both in church and state. Since 1642 upwards of 3,000 persons have been admitted to academical degrees, about 1,370 of whom are still living.

About 1,000 of those who received education there have been ordained to the work of the gospel ministry.” At that time Harvard’s president was Rev. Joseph Willard, and a member of the corporation was James Bowdoin. The statute providing for the Board of Overseers is very interesting, in light of the democratic election of that body today. The statute decreed that the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, all members of the Governor’s Council, all forty members of the State Senate, and the ministers of the Congregational Churches of the towns of Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, Roxbury and Dorchester, would comprise the Board.

At that time the entire faculty of Harvard consisted of ten persons -six professors and four tutors. Already there were endowed professorships the two Hollistown professors of Divinity and Mathematics, and the Hancock professor of Hebrew. Among the college officers of that day are listed a steward and a butler.

A page in the old Register is also devoted to Dartmouth College, which had been founded in 1770 by Eleazer Wheelock, who in 1786 was still the president. Wheelock himself was Professor of History, and he was assisted by three other professors, assigned respectively to Mathematics, Divinity and Learned Languages. No other college is mentioned, although a number had been founded before 1786.

One of the respected Massachusetts officers was Keeper of the Powder Magazine. There were two of those magazines, one located in Boston, the other across the river in Charlestown. This is the way the 1786 Register describes one of them: “The powder magazine at Boston is at the western extremity of the town, built of hewn stone in 1774. The walls are seven feet thick and the earth over it, three feet thick, is bomb proof. It will contain 1,000 barrels of powder.”

In those days before the Constitution, each of the 13 states levied its own duties — a practice leading to considerable confusion and a great amount of smuggling. In Massachusetts a 25% ad valorem duty was levied on coaches, chariots and phaetons; on ale and beer; on every kind of ready-made clothing; and on all furniture brought in from the outside. The state certainly intended to protect its farmers, for the tax was 15% on beef, pork, butter and cheese imported from any other state. The tax on hard soap and candles was 20%. And there was a very long list of articles on which a 12% tax was collected, including psalm books and spelling books, silver and ivory handled knives and forks, all kinds of jewelry, flowers and feathers worn for ornament, wigs, cushions, tin ware, hair powder, and children’s toys.

One of the most curious duties was that on salt, the statute concerning which was worded as follows: “Sixpence shall be taxed on every bushel of salt imported in vessels owned by any subject of the King of Great Britain, but salt shall not be taxed if imported in vessels not owned by British subjects.”

Some of the excise duties were low, in light of the practice 172 years later. For every gallon of N.E. rum, four pence; for every gallon of Madeira wine, one shilling; for every pound of coffee, one penny; for every hundred lemons, 9 pence; for every beaver hat, 6 shillings; for every pound of cocoa, one penny; for every pound of Indian tea, one shilling; and every pound of Bokea tea, 6 pence.

Here was the statute on smuggling: “In order to prevent smuggling, either by land or water, the selectmen of the several towns shall appoint suitable persons to give information to the collectors of import and excise all breaches of the act that shall come to their knowledge. In case of seizure, not only the dutied goods, but also the vessel, cart, wagon or sled conveying the goods, is to be forfeited.”

The Laws of Massachusetts, when the 1786 Register was published, demanded that every town must provide one or more gospel ministers. Concerning this provision, the Register said: “The inhabitants of each town are to take due care to be constantly provided with an able, learned, orthodox minister, of good conversation, to disperse the word of God to them. He is to be suitably encouraged and sufficiently supported.” The Register then went on to say:

“There are and have been for a number of years past, upward of 100 parishes in the Commonwealth that have had no minister.” The Register might have added, but did not, that one of those pastorless towns was the Kennebec river town of Winslow.

It is interesting to note the ministers which the 1786 Register listed as functioning in Maine. There were two in York, three in Kittery, two in Wells, and one each at Berwick, Arundel, Biddeford, Lebanon, Pepperelboro and Fryeburg, with vacant parishes in all the other eight towns of York County. In Cumberland County the recognized religious leader was the famous Parson Smith of Falmouth (now Portland). Smith is the man who kept a detailed journal of all happenings in Portland, and indeed allover Maine from 1724 to 1790, and that journal is one of our most valuable sources of Maine history. Already in 1786 Samuel Dean, the man who continued Smith’s journal up into the nineteenth century, had come to assist Parson Smith with Falmouth’s First Parish. Other ministers in the town were Ebenezer Williams and Thomas Brown, and there were two vacant pulpits. It is therefore impressive that, within ten years after the Declaration of Independence, there were five organized churches in Portland.

Scarborough had two ministers, and one was at work in each of the towns of Brunswick, Cape Elizabeth, Harpswell, Gorham, Windham and New Gloucester, with vacancies in seven of the towns, including Bridgton. At Pownalborough, county seat of Lincoln County, the orthodox or Congregational Church was presided over by Rev. Thomas Moore, but the older Episcopal Church, the first on the Kennebec north of Georgetown, that had been founded by Elder Bailey in 1760, was vacant. Bailey, an unrepentant loyalist or Tory, had been forced to flee to Canada during the Revolution, and by 1786 no one had come to take his place. North of Pownalborough there was not a single minister listed on the Kennebec in the year 1786. The parishes at Hallowell, Vassalboro and Winslow were all vacant. While there were settled ministers at Bristol and Edgecomb, the even older parishes at Waldoboro and Thomaston were vacant. But in far-away Machias there lived and preached the only minister east of Bristol.

By 1786 religious liberty was pretty well established in Massachusetts. The Baptists had already become sufficiently numerous to rate a page in the Register. In addition to some forty Baptist churches in what is now Massachusetts, there were five in the District of Maine. They were located at Bowdoinham, Gorham, Harpswell, New Gloucester and Thomaston, but only Bowdoinham and Thomaston had settled ministers, the latter parish being in charge of Rev. Isaac Case, who played an important part in the founding and early development of Colby College. In Boston, besides the orthodox churches, there were the Episcopal King’s Chapel, the Quaker Meetinghouse in Leverett Lane, the Presbyterian Church on Long Lane, Trinity Episcopal on Summer Street, and a church called the Antipaedobaptist. The Society of Friends had churches in Salem, Lynn, Kittery, Worcester and Falmouth.

The law required teaching as well as preaching, having 50 householders or upwards must be constantly. It said: “Every town provided with a schoolmaster, to teach children and youth to read and write; and where any town has 100 families or householders, there is also to be a grammar school, and some discreet person, well instructed in the tongues, shall be procured to teach the same, and be suitably encouraged and paid by the inhabitants.”

The common school, first provided in the law, became the origin of the American elementary school, as we know it. The grammar school, required in the larger towns, was something quite different. The requirement that the master be “well instructed in the tongues” meant that he must be able to teach Latin and Greek. Indeed the grammar school was first called the Latin Grammar School, a name· brought over from England, and that kind of school became the origin of the New England Academy. The earliest such schools seldom used both Latin and Grammar in their titles, but they frequently used one or the other.

Schools of this kind, which were established before the beginning of the 18th century, included the Roxbury Latin School, the Boston Latin School, and the Hopkins Grammar School at New Haven. All of them were what we would today call college preparatory schools. It was long afterward that the term “grading” of the schools took place. They were in many places divided into four levels: primary, intermediate, grammar and high schools. Such was the division in the town of Bridgton when I attended the village schools there more than fifty years ago.

Now let’s turn to a topic of the early 1900’s. A lot of older people in Central Maine remember a famous woman hunter of the Rangeley region, one whom everybody called “Flyrod”. In early November, 1903 the Kennebec Journal reported: “Miss Cornelia Crosby of Phillips, better know as Flyrod, has been the guest of Commissioner and Mrs. Carleton at Winthrop, and she visited the State House at Augusta. It was F1yrod who first awakened general interest in the Rangeleys. For years people in New York and other cities thought that Rangeley was the only hunting and fishing region in the whole state, so effective was the work of Flyrod’s pen. It was she who first called Maine the nation’s playground. She was the first champion of woman’s right to hunt and fish. She was the first to crusade for the protection of songbirds and gulls. She has given her life to the interests of Maine forests, lakes and streams. A New York newspaper has called her the ‘oracle of the Maine playground’. She is now forced to use crutches, but only two years ago she shot a deer while using them. In 1897 she shot a caribou, said to be the last one shot in Maine.”

Those of you who patronize a famous dining room at Phillips can identify the home of Flyrod when I tell you that it was next to Greenwood Inn, now conducted by my friends Mr. and Mrs. Vincent York.

Year: 1958