Radio Script #588

Little Talks on Common Things

November 3, 1963

When City Treasurer Welton Farrow turned up the huge collection of town records and other papers of Waterville’s early days, discarded in an abandoned toilet at City Hall, I thought we had made the final discovery of important data about early days in Waterville. I was therefore surprised and delighted when, last spring, Dr. and Mrs. J. Rutherford Gettens of Washington, D.C, allowed me to examine more than 70 original manuscripts dealing with two of Waterville’s most prominent pioneers, Obadiah Williams and Abijah Smith. Smith married a daughter of Williams, so that Mrs. Gettens claims descent from both of those men, who figured so prominently in this community a century and a half ago. Mrs. Gettens has now placed these important papers for permanent preservation in the Waterville Public Library.

The best remembered fact connecting Williams and Smith is that, nearly fifty years after Williams had presented to the town the land on which the first combined meeting house and town house was built, and where later the City Hall was erected, Smith gave a plot of adjoining land that made the common. To Obadiah Williams and Abijah Smith, Waterville owes to this day its public building lot and the cleared land of Castonguay Square.

Actually we have not known very much about Dr. Obadiah Williams. The Centennial History of Waterville, published in 1902, tells us that the man was born in 1752, probably in New Hampshire, that he served as a surgeon in the Revolutionary regiment of General Starks, that at the close of the war he came with his family to Winslow and settled on Lot 104, on the west side of the river, the lot that included the falls. The Centennial History further says that in 1792 Dr. Williams built on Water Street the first frame house to be erected on the west side of the Kennebec, and that in 1795 he built on the north side of Silver Street the first two-story house in Waterville.

When that history was written, Dr. Williams had been dead for 103 years, for he passed away in 1799. Every male descendant had either died or left Waterville.

The writers of the Centennial History could find out little about him. They may therefore be readily excused for their error in asserting that “at the close of the war he came with his family to Winslow”, although ten years earlier, in 1892, Kingsbury had said in his History of Kennebec County that Williams came to Winslow from Sidney in 1792.

At last, thanks to the Gettens papers, we know exactly what happened, and we learn that Obadiah Williams was no ordinary man, that even before he came to this community he was a person of significance and some wealth. Also, what no other account of him has before revealed, he was, like his fellow physician, Dr. John McKechnie, a surveyor of lands for the Plymouth Company.

From the Gettens papers we learn that, during the Revolution, Obadiah Williams was a resident of Epping, New Hampshire, for on December 23, 1776, Joseph Edgerly of that town deeded to “Obadiah Williams of Epping, physician, for one hundred pounds lawful money, a parcel of land in Epping, consisting of six acres.”

Soon afterward Williams engaged to become a surgeon in the army, and deeded the land, with house and barn, to one Henry Dearborn.

After his service with General Stark’s regiment, Williams returned to Epping and again received from Joseph Edgerly a deed to land — this time a smaller piece of two acres for which Williams paid 30 pounds. In 1781, or possibly a year earlier, Williams became interested in the distribution of Maine lands being promoted by the Plymouth Company. That was the company founded by Dr. Sylvester Gardiner and several associates in 1749. They succeeded in purchasing from the heirs of the four men who had obtained it from the Plymouth Colony in 1661, the vast area of land known as the Kennebec Purchase, 15 miles each side of the Kennebec all the way from the Cobboseecontee to Skowhegan Falls.

Williams became interested in that part of the Kennebec Purchase that now comprises the towns of Mount Vernon and Belgrade. and in 1781 he acquired a lot in the area, which then went by the name of Washington Plantation. But before that took place, Williams and his partners went to a lot of trouble. It seems that in 1775, just as the Revolution was breaking out, the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. popularly known as the Plymouth Company, had granted that particular tract of land to Jonathan Pinkham, but because of the war, he had been unable to get settlers, and the grant had apparently fallen into default. The difficulty was to prove that the grant to Pinkham had ever contained the usual provision that there must be a certain number of settlers with cabins and cleared land within a certain number of years. Let us see what the Gettens papers tell us about that legal situation.

One paper is dated June 12, 1781, and is headed: “General meeting of the inhabitants and others concerned in settling a tract of land known by the name of Washington, lying north of Winthrop and west of Vassalborough, on the Kennebec River. Meeting held at Captain Enoch Page’s of Hallowell. Samuel Du~ton, Hallowell, moderator. Obadiah Williams, late of Epping, New Hampshire. clerk. Voted to appoint a committee to collect all papers respecting the original grant to settle said Washington. directed by the Plymouth Company in Boston to Jonathan Pinkham and others; likewise to take the deposition of any person able to testify anything touching the proof of such original grant.”

Among the thirty signers of that decision was not only Obadiah Williams, but another man whom we had never before associated with another Maine town — Nathaniel Gilman, who was to become Waterville’s wealthiest citizen. We now know, therefore, that the two Waterville pioneers, Williams and Gilman. were both previously settlers of that part of Washington Plantation that is now the town of Belgrade.

Proof sought by that meeting was hard to get. but at last Williams, Gilman and their associates succeeded in satisfying the Massachusetts court. Dunmer Sewall deposed that he had seen a letter to Pinkham in 1775, signed by Sylvester Gardiner, and he swore that a letter which Obadiah Williams placed in the hands of James Bowdoin of the Plymouth Company was indeed that letter. What Gardiner was alleged to have written to Pinkham was as follows: “Sir, I am favored with your letter of the 9th instant, desiring leave from the Kennebec Proprietors to settle with others on their land, and they have granted you and your associates leave to settle thereon agreeable to their letter of the 21st instant which I here inclose: The committee propose that you and Mr. Cornelius Baker be a committee to settle this town, and you are desired not to admit any drunken people. Mr. Jones, the surveyor, will advise you the manner of taking settlers’ petitions and laying out the plantation. I heartily wish you success and am your obedient servant, Sylvester Gardiner.”

The item in the Gettens collection is not the original Gardiner letter. but a copy of it made by Obadiah Williams, for the paper bears the following endorsement: “The paper of which the within is a copy being demanded by James Bowdoin, Esq., I, Obadiah Williams, on this 16th day of July, 1781, take this a copy of their true contents in Boston in the presence of Samuel Dutton.”

The copy of an original letter, which Gardiner enclosed in his letter to Pinkham, was dated five days earlier than the Gardiner letter — that is, on April 21, 1775, just two days after the Battle of Lexington, where were fired the first shots of the Revolution. That letter from the committee of the Plymouth Company to Jonathan Pinkham said: “James Pitts and Sylvester Gardiner laid your settlers’ petition before the committee of the Kennebec Company, who have agreed that you should have leave to settle on the land; namely, bounded on the south by the town of Winthrop, and to extend six miles up the river, on the west as far as the bounds of the Kennebec Purchase, which is 15 miles from the river and on the east bordered by the third tier of lots. You may layout the land as you please at your own expense in the same manner as the town of Winthrop, in lots of 200 acres, two to be marked S for settlers, then two to be marked P for Proprietors, and so on alternately two and and two through the whole tract. As soon as you have got an accurate plan, you will return it to the committee. The settlers that you and Mr. Baker shall recommend shall, as soon as they petition, have a grant from the company of such settlers’ lots as they shall choose upon the usual conditions of settlement.”

The court accepted the authenticity of that letter and was especially impressed by its last sentence containing the words “usual conditions of settlement”, for those conditions were well known and had been often repeated in similar grants. A settler was allowed to take possession of one of the 200 acre lots and afterward receive a warranty deed of it if at the end of three years he had lived on it continuously, had cleared and cultivated an acre of land, and had built a house at least 20 feet square and seven feet high. Since obviously, six years after the grant to Pinkham, those conditions had not been complied with, the Company with the consent of the court made a new grant to Obadiah Williams and his associates. That grant, dated July 17, 1781, gives us for the first time the information that Williams was a recognized surveyor. After granting the land of Washington Plantation to the new petitioners, the paper said: “The Proprietors request that the lots be confirmed by Dr. Williams or some other surveyor, who shall complete the laying out of the tract. The said Williams is first to run and establish the westerly line of Vassalborough and the northerly line of Winthrop, according to the acts incorporating those towns, then to layout six ranges of lots, each one mile wide, each lot in each range to be one mile long and 100 rods wide making 200 acres each.

Williams was personally to have his choice among the settlers’ lots, but we have no evidence which one he chose. That he did settle there is clear, however, from the fact that between 1781 and 1786 there were issued several deeds’ to “Obadiah Williams of Washington”. Not until 1787 is he described as “Obadiah Williams of Vassalboro”. Why does the Kingsbury History of Kennebec County say he came to Winslow from Sidney? Because, when he changed residence from Washington to Vassalboro, Williams settled on the west side of the Kennebec in that town, the part of Vassalboro that was later set aside to form the town of Sidney.

Next week we’ll learn some more about Obadiah Williams in his Vassalboro and his Waterville years.

Year: 1963