Radio Script #655

Little Talks #655

May 30, 1965

It is time we had something more to say about the town of Sidney. Several times we have mentioned that old town on this program, and about ten years ago we devoted several broadcasts to Sidney’s early nineteenth century physician, Dr. Ambrose Howard.

Pioneers came to settle in what was wilderness on the west side of the Kennebec, between Fort Western and Fort Halifax, as early as 1760. Eleven years later the area was incorporated into the big town of Vassalboro. In 1792 it was set aside as the separate town of Sidney. Just why the town was named for Sir Philip Sidney no one seems to have recorded, but there is no question that the noble Earl of Leicester was an Elizabethan courtier with a high reputation in the colonies.

Sir Philip had been dead nearly two hundred years when the Maine town of Sidney was incorporated, but descendants of first settlers of Massachusetts Bay remembered well the stories they had been told about his fame as a soldier and his worth as a chivalrous gentleman. Receiving a grievous wound in the Dutch war in 1586, and suffering pangs of thirst, Sir Philip gave the water he had called for to a wounded private soldier, saying to him, “Thy necessity is greater than mine”. Sir Philip’s sonnets are famous in English literature, and they had considerable influence upon his younger contemporary, William Shakespeare.

Abial Lovejoy, pioneer ancestor of a Sidney family of several generations, was a man so prominent in business and town affairs that he was called Squire Lovejoy.

Yet, when Kingsbury wrote his History of Kennebec County in 1892, all he could tell about the old squire was a story involving Negro slaves. Kingsbury says that, when Massachusetts voted to free all slaves in the Commonwealth, Lovejoy owned half a dozen. Two of the oldest were a married couple, Salem and Venus. The squire told the couple they were now free and could go whither they would. They had been with Lovejoy a long time and had evidently worked hard for him. At any rate, this is what Salem is reported to have said in reply to the Squire’s offer of freedom: “You’se had all de meat, now pick de bones.”

The land survey made by General Winslow, in response to settlement plans of the Plymouth Company, laid out three ranges of lots on the west side of the river, each range a mile deep, and to be bordered by a highway parallel with the Kennebec. Such highways were actually built in Waterville and are still known as the First and Second Rangeways, but in Sidney two subsequent north-south highways did not follow the range lines. Very early there were three such north-south roads, just as there are today: the River Road, following closely the course of the Kennebec, and most of the time within sight of the river; the Pond Road, skirting the east side of Messalonskee Lake; and between the two the Middle Road, along which came to be built the townhouse, a church, and other public buildings where arose a settlement known as Bacon’s Corner.

The largest settlement in early Sidney was, however, at West Sidney, because it was on the stage route from Augusta to Farmington. It was at West Sidney that there arose the earliest stores, and the place became a central trading post for a wide surrounding area.

By many persons in Central Maine, Messalonskee Lake is still called Snow Pond. The name had nothing to do with the white stuff that descends upon us in winter. The lake got its name from James Snow, who came to Sidney in 1804. I have often thought that Sidney contains one physical feature that would provide the scene for a good novel. I refer to the town’s Great Bog. What a scene for a mystery story, something like the Hound of the Baskerville’s, which presented Sherlock Holmes with one of his greatest puzzles. That bog contains a thousand acres, one twentieth of the entire surface of the town.

Many Maine towns sent far more than their expected quotas of men to the battlefields of the Civil War, but few towns gained fame by their contributions to an earlier conflict, the War of 1812. Yet in that rather unpopular fracas known as “Mr. Madison’s War”, the little town of Sidney raised a large part of three whole companies of infantry.

One of the War of 1812 regiments raised in Maine was known as Col. Sherwin’s regiment. Sidney men were officers in three of its companies. Of one Richard Smith was captain and Benjamin Lovejoy was lieutenant. Of another Stephen Lovejoy was captain and Joseph Warren was lieutenant. The third had Amos Lesley as captain and Bethrel Perry as lieutenant. In those three companies a total of 127 men came from Sidney.

At one time Sidney had memorable industries. All of them were small, but most of them were prosperous. Of course the commonest industry in the early Maine towns was the sawmill. Sidney had a lot of those mills. Many of those, near the close of the 18th century and in the first decade of the 19th, were located on the River Road. On that road the southernmost stream was Thayer Brook, on which in the 1700’s a saw mill was built by John and Milton Sawtelle. That old mill stood until 1880, although even before that time its efficiency had been surpassed by more modern mills. Another mill, nearer the river, was owned by Bailey and Sawtelle. Sawtelle also had a shipyard on the Kennebec, where he built a small schooner of about a hundred tons — the only river trader ever built in the town of Sidney. The shipyard was abandoned about 1840.

As early was 1763 John Marsh, one of the town’s first settlers, erected a saw mill on Bog Brook, but in 1774 it was washed out by a big freshet. That flood resulted in one of Sidney’s first tragedies. Thomas Clark had two bags of meal in the mill. He had left his corn there to be ground while he went on an errand further up the road. When he returned the waters were rising rapidly to the mill floor. Clark retrieved one of his bags and dashed back into the mill to get the second. He never emerged. The torrent took him and the whole mill to destruction.

In the early Central Maine communities, where cattle soon became plentiful, and where deer and moose hides, as well as cow hides, needed quick treatment to prevent spoilage, necessary industry was the tannery. Before 1800 Sidney had four of them one on Hastings Brook west of the River Road, another nearer the Waterville line, a third near Bacon’s Corner, and a fourth at West Sidney.

The first signs of what later became Central Maine’s big textile factories were the carding mills. Carding wool by hand was a tedious, laborious process, and cards operated by water power were welcome. A big carding mill stood on the lower Messalonskee in Waterville, downstream from what is now the Memorial Bridge, long before 1800. But quite as old was Daniel Ormby’s carding mill on Hastings Brook in Sidney.

You may recall that it was not until 1818 that any religious denomination was organized in Waterville. The old town of Winslow, while it still comprised the settlement on the west side of the river that would in 1802 become the separate town of Waterville, had indeed organized an independent church, belonging to none of the regular denominations, and had hired as its first minister the Rev. Joshua Cushman.

Two meeting houses had been built, one on each side of the river. Of course many of the settlers had been affiliated with some denomination before they came to this region. In all the Kennebec Valley towns there were orthodox Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Universalists, and a few Episcopalians, especially in Gardiner and Hallowell. Not until Jeremiah Chaplin landed in Waterville in 1818 were the handful of Baptists in this region organized into a formal Baptist Church and they were the first denominational group to have a church in this town.

Sidney was much earlier with its denominational recognition. Asa Wilbur and Lenvriel Jackson of Sidney had become staunch Calvinist Baptists, and in 1791 they succeeded in forming a Baptist Church in that town — 27 years before the organization of the Baptist Church in Waterville. A hundred and fifty years ago people took religion, at least the theological beliefs connected with it, much more seriously than they do today. The stern Calvinism of Sidney’s first church with its belief in predestination, described as meaning “when you’re born you’re done for”, was too much for some of the folks to take. They broke off and formed the Second Baptist Church of Sidney in 1806.

It was 30 years after the formation of Sidney’s First Baptist Church before either they or the Second Church had a meeting house. At last one was built in 1821, and so preceded the Baptist meeting house in Waterville by four years. Five men furnished most of the money to erect the Sidney meeting house: Dr. Ambrose Howard, John Sawtelle, Paul Bailey, James Shaw and Jonathan Mathews. They partially recovered their investment by selling the pews.

The Baptist meeting house was not the first to go up in Sidney, although its church organization was the earliest in town. The first church building in Sidney was erected by the Methodists at Bacon’s Corner in 1815, six years before the Baptist building was opened. The Methodists certainly prospered, for in 1828, only thirteen years after they had built the first meeting house, that society erected the largest house of worship ever built in Sidney.

Compared with the modern expense of construction, building was cheap in the early years of the 19th century. When, for instance, the voters of Sidney decided in 1825 to put up a town house in the center of the town, the cost was only $500. A schoolhouse in 1827 was built for $280.

Many of our older residents remember the ferry that operated across the Kennebec between Getchell’s Corner in Vassalboro and the opposite Sidney shore. What is not so well remembered is that there was a second ferry, farther down the river, between Sidney and Riverside. As long ago as 1890 both ferries had become unprofitable, and, like the commuter railroads in metropolitan centers today, were kept in operation only by subsidies from the towns. In 1892 it cost the town of Sidney $128 for its share in running the two ferries. We must now bring these rather rambling remarks about Sidney to a close and say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1965