Radio Script #725

Little Talks on Common Things

April 9, 1967

I have sometimes mentioned on this program a man I want to tell you more about today. He was, when he died in 1902, one of the best known and most highly respected lawyers in Maine. He was Josiah Hayden Drummond, member of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Winslow and Waterville, the same family to which belonged the recently deceased Albert F. Drummond and his numerous children and grandchildren.

Josiah Drummond, born in Winslow in 1827, was a fifth generation descendant from Alexander Drummond, who came from Scotland to Georgetown, near the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1729. His oldest son, Patrick, born in Scotland in 1694, was the father of John Drummond, whose widow, Mary McFadden Drummond, came to Winslow in 1790 with her son John. She had another son, Rutherford Drummond, who about the same time settled in that part of Vassalboro that later became the town of Sidney. By the time that Waterville became a separate town in 1802, there were several families of Drummonds in Vassalboro, Winslow, Sidney and Waterville.

The John Drummond who settled in Winslow had been born in Georgetown in 1772, and in 1795, after coming to this region, he married Damaris Hayden, daughter of Josiah and Silence Howard Hayden, members of two of the best known early families of Winslow. John and Damaris Drummond had nine children, the oldest of whom was Clark Drummond, born in 1796, who married Cynthia Blackwell of another prominent pioneer family of this area. On what came to be the well known Drummond farm in Winslow, all eleven of Clark and Cynthia Drummond’s children were born. One of those children was Josiah Hayden Drummond, the man I am talking about today.

Few boys in the early nineteenth century were able to pursue education beyond the common school, but Josiah Drummond was one of those fortunate boys. His father sent him to old Vassalboro Academy where he prepared for admission to college and easily passed the entrance examination to Waterville College (now Colby) in 1842.

The college was very small in those days — only about 50 students, all boys. At no time were there more than nine boys in Josiah Drummond’s class during his four years in college and when he graduated in 1846, he was one of only five to receive a diploma. When Josiah entered Waterville College the president was one of the few misfits ever to hold that office. Eliphaz Fay lasted only two years and was succeeded by the Rev. David Sheldon, who remained in the office for ten years.

Sheldon was one of the ablest, but also one of the most controversial of Colby presidents. When chosen for the college presidency, he was pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church. Early in his college presidency he exhibited liberal theological views that alarmed the hard-shelled Baptists who supported the college. After he left the presidential office. Sheldon went to Bath, where he abandoned the Baptist faith altogether, and became a crusading Unitarian. In 1860 he returned to Waterville to become the first pastor of the Waterville Unitarian Church. Largely because of the remarkable Christian spirit of the then Baptist pastor, George Dana Boardman Pepper, the ministers of the Baptist and the Unitarian churches became close friends and jOintly supported the college and the community.

Even in Josiah Drummond’s time not all the men who attended Waterville College were deep-water Calvinist Baptists. One of Drummond’s classmates was Thomas Herrick who was at one time principal of the Waterville Liberal Institute, a school founded by the Universalists to compete with Waterville Academy, operated by the Baptists. It was the latter school that later became Coburn Classical Institute.

It is often erroneously assumed that, in its early days, Colby turned out only clergymen. That such was not the case is strikingly shown by Josiah Drummond’s class. Of the five graduates in that Class of 1846 only one, Hugh Dempsey, was a minister. The Universalist. Thomas Herrick, later became a lawyer like Drummond. George Starkey and Zenas Wilbury were both physicians, the latter serving as a provost surgeon in the Civil War, and the former being for many years a professor of anatomy and surgery at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.

While Josiah Drummond was a college senior, he was suddenly called to the temporary principalship of China Academy, where a quarter of a century earlier the illustrious Elijah Parish Lovejoy had prepared for the same Waterville College. After his graduation, Drummond continued for a brief time at China, then became head of the school where he himself had prepared for college, Vassalboro Academy. But Josiah Drummond was not destined for a career in education. He decided he would become a lawyer and carve out a career in that profession and in public life.

At that time the most prominent lawyer in Waterville, and one of the foremost in Maine, was Timothy Boutelle. In those days there were no law schools. A young man who wanted to become a lawyer read law in the office of an established attorney, who often helped the younger man prepare for the bar examination. That indeed had been just the way a young man out in Illinois named Abraham Lincoln had become a lawyer only about a dozen years before Josiah Drummond came under the tutelage of Timothy Boutelle. In 1850 Josiah was admitted to the Maine bar.

At once Josiah made a trip to California, where a lot of Maine young men had been attracted by the gold rush. He did not go to seek gold, but to practice his profession, and he was indeed admitted to the California bar. Josiah stayed in the west only one year, returning to Maine in the fall of 1851 to become a partner in the Boutelle office. When Timothy Boutelle died in 1855, Drummond became sole proprietor of the firm. In 1860 he left Waterville for the greater legal opportunity offered by Maine’s largest city, Portland.

Almost at once after going to Portland, Josiah Drummond was elected to the Maine legislature. There he became especially interested in a development that was to make him one of the state’s leading corporation attorneys. Three years after Josiah’s graduation from college, and while he was reading law with Timothy Boutelle, the railroad had come to Waterville. In the years between that occasion in 1849 and the opening of the Civil War, railroad lines had extended rapidly in Maine. Drummond became leading counsel for several railroad corporations and became known as the railroad lawyer of Maine. In 1859 he was elected to the State Senate, and then became Attorney General, holding that office throughout the Civil War.

An outstanding event in Drummond’s life was his participation in the Republican national convention of 1864. The nomination of Abraham Lincoln for a second term was certain, long before the convention met, but the vice-presidency was another matter. There was never any serious difference between Lincoln and his first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. But, as the convention time drew near, Lincoln became convinced that his reelection would be more nearly assured if a border-state loyal Unionist could be presented for second place on the ticket. Drummond went to the convention determined to see Hamlin renominated. Because he was unsuccessful, his friend Hamlin just missed becoming President of the U.S., when an assassin’s bullet felled the great Lincoln.

Josiah Drummond also achieved distinction as an outstanding Mason. A masonic historian has written: “Save for Thomas Smith Webb, who gave form to Masonry in this country, no man has done more for that ancient craft in America than has Josiah Drummond.”

In 1849, the very year when the first steam locomotive entered Waterville, Josiah Drummond was made a master mason in the Waterville Lodge. Ten years later he was the lodge master, and from 1860 to 1863 he was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Maine. He also headed both the Maine Grand Chapter and the state’s Grand Commandery. In 1871 he became supreme head of the Grand Chapter of the U.S., and for three years he was national head of the Grand Council. In 1862 Drummond became a thirty-third degree Mason, the highest distinction that can come to a member of the fraternity.

One outstanding service to Masonry was Drummond’s work on the committee of jurisprudence, not only for the Masonic bodies of Maine, but also for those of the entire nation. Equally important, and perhaps of even more permanence, was his work as masonic historian, and his writings on the development of the various masonic bodies provide standard reference to this day.

Before Josiah Drummond left Waterville for Portland, he was known as a strong Democrat. The Republican Party was then only six years old and had suffered a bad defeat in 1856 when its candidate Fremont had been beaten by James Buchanan. Although a Democrat, Josiah Drummond was, as early as 1850, firmly opposed to slavery. When in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened the way for slavery into hitherto prohibited territory, he announced he would leave the party unless they held to their old position of non-extension of slavery into new territory that lay north of the Missouri Compromise line; namely, 36 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude.

In 1855 Drummond was a member of the Democratic state convention, but he left the hall in disgust when the adopted platform included a plank upholding the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Drummond immediately joined the body of Maine men who were setting up the new Republican party in this state.

In 1856 the town of Waterville sent Republican candidate Josiah Drummond as their representative to the legislature. In 1857 he was elected Speaker of the Maine House. In 1859 he was promoted to the state senate. Near the close of the session he resigned to take the post of Attorney General.

Mr. Drummond was counsel in many famous railroad cases. When the Eastern Railroad out of Boston secured exclusive control of the Portland, Saco and Piscataqua R.R. from Berwick Junction to Portland, and undertook to run trains past that junction without stopping to receive passengers from the western line, the Boston and Maine, Drummond secured an injunction against the Eastern, and forced its passenger trains without exception to stop at Berwick Junction. That injunction continued in force until the Boston & Maine obtained control of both lines.

Josiah Drummond, as a descendant of a colonial immigrant, was greatly interested in genealogy and local history, and he was an influential member of the Maine Historical Society. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, indeed, one of the leading citizens of Maine was Waterville native Josiah Hayden Drummond.

Year: 1967